


Each Mortal Thing

by jouissant



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Lovers, Gender Identity, M/M, Near Death, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Racism, THE DRESS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:50:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21540904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Truth is a concept with which James Fitzjames has been variously acquainted.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 94
Kudos: 288
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph from "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. 
> 
> Fun fact which I did not learn until [what-alchemy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy) suggested I use this poem for the title: Hopkins was a nephew by marriage of Katherine Beechey, daughter of Frederick William Beechey, who went to the Arctic under then-lieutenant John Franklin on Buchan's 1818 expedition and who named Beechey Island, where the Franklin Expedition would later winter, after his father (and who has a tiny, unflattering cameo in this fic.) 
> 
> Speaking of unflattering cameos, I'm sure George Barrow was a fine person whose scandal was probably some perfectly above-board gay shit by modern standards, but for the purposes of this story he is kind of a shitheel. Sorry George!
> 
> Thanks to [what-alchemy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy) for providing endless help, titling assistance, brain twinning, and constant readiness to scream about James Fitzjames. Thanks also to Terror fandom for being incredibly inspiring- this is far from the first James-centric fic to consider these themes but I couldn't resist jumping in and tackling them myself.
> 
> For my "London" square for Terror Bingo 2019!

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's  
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;  
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:  
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;  
Selves — goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,  
Crying _Whát I dó is me: for that I came._

* * *

James keeps finding himself in the hold on _Erebus_ , pawing through Sir John’s trunk. It is full of trifles: masks with painted mouths, crowns and paper flowers, scarves of florid silk. A centurion’s helmet, meant for a Britannia costume, which he thinks rather dashing, and scores of others besides. Later he will find it—all of it—quite troubling, but today he smiles at these things in passing and sets them to one side. He hasn’t returned to the trunk for them. 

The dress is brownish velvet, the color of sargassum. It might have been red once, or violet; indeed there are patches of rich color still, in the deepest folds of its skirt, in the pressed seams. But on the whole it is brown, and he finds as he holds it against him that the color flatters him, that the dress seems to brighten and improve his features. James has not felt quite himself lately. His head aches. His eyes are dry and glassy. But here against the velvet they seem to twinkle, and aided by the dress’s faded luxury his cheeks are not windburned but merely flushed from pinching, or rouged like a whore’s.

He dreams up Carnivale before this trunk, stroking the dress on his lap like a pet. Around him, wedged in the ice, the ship heaves and sighs as though she’s dreaming too: of leads, of clear sailing. In the silence between these wooden groans he can hear his own hand move against the velvet. Softest, softest, like the tread of a boot sole on new snow. He holds the dress up again, bodice to breast.

James is vain, but he is also a realist. The greater part of his beauty lies in how well he keeps himself. His face is broad. His conformation might be described as raw-boned, and he looks like an outsized schoolboy if he cuts his hair above the ears. He has seen paintings of his father, commissioned in the man’s last days of solvency. He has watched them for long hours, but he cannot fully place himself there. If he could see his mother, if he had but one memory, however foxed by time—but he doesn’t. His past is a country he has worked to forget. His future, writ in ice, is yet undiscovered. James knows himself only in the present, in the reflection of the men around him in the wardroom. Alone in the low light, a bundle of velvet in his hands, he casts about and is unsurprised to find that at the moment he does not know himself at all.

He won’t wear the dress to Carnivale, of course. Not that it is so preposterous an idea; James has been to a pantomime, and he knows the sorts of entertainments men devise on a long passage. He has played the woman several times before, and he has heard a rumor that Francis Crozier himself, in more ebullient days, once escorted a begowned James Ross to a polar masquerade.

So James does not lack for precedent. Were he still Sir John’s second, were Francis sound, then he might get away with it. It might be seen to rouse the men, speak to their commander’s good cheer, his frivolity. He would wear one of the maquillaged masks, duck his head and play coyly at anonymity. How the men might hoot and whistle, how they might grab for him—it steals his breath to imagine it, and James huffs it out again in his corner of the hold like a fall of diamonds.

But Sir John is dead, and James hasn’t spoken to Francis in a fortnight. He’s barely seen him, only catching a glimpse when Jopson forgets himself, when he fails to mop Francis’s brow and empty his piss pot and also bar the door all at once. When James does spy Francis, he is discomfited. He has always thought of Francis as ruddy, but now his face is waxy pale as a sweating cheese. His sickroom, too, has a certain tang, which James notes with some embarrassment on his first’s behalf. It is none of it his fault, James thinks. It is a brave thing Francis does, and he ought to be lauded for it. James does laud him, with effusiveness. Nevermind his many years of being stymied by the man.

“Nevermind Francis Crozier, full stop,” James says to the empty hold.

No, he will be Brittania at Carnivale. With her helm and breastplate he will shine in the candlelight and put the men in mind of the rising sun they gather to greet. He drags out the toga with its hammered brass accoutrements, runs his palm over the stiff horsehair crest of the helmet. It is not so mossy as the velvet, which disheartens him, and so just once more he sets his chosen costume aside and takes up the dress.

James looks around him. He has bid the officers not to leave their choice too long, and he fears he may be beset by others who would come down to the hold to look. But the ship is as quiet as she ever is, which is to say not so quiet, but the tromp of steps abovedecks has grown no heavier in the last five minutes. Surely James can be assured of privacy for five more.

He shucks his waistcoat and gansey with alacrity, reminded of warmer days, shinning sea-cliffs to plunge back down into the salt and the blue, the way boys could dart like slick fish underwater, hands sliding over backs and bellies, parting legs, and then away. He gasps to feel the cold hit him, his skin all points, gooseflesh and nipples. In the cold he can’t bear to bring his trousers down all the way, and he ought to be ready if someone comes. So he slips the dress on overhead, smoothing the velvet against his arms and chest. He has avoided the looking glass lately, but he knows the hang of his uniform, a new sharpness about the hips. His need is beginning to outstrip biscuits and tins of Goldner’s finest. He has peculiar and specific cravings. Fried calves’ liver, jellied marrow. A handful of earth. A bathtub of lime juice. The ice itself, which he would jaw in great handfuls if he would not seem mad to do so.

James bites at the inside of his cheek and considers himself. He cannot be said to be at his prime, but nonetheless, he makes a passable woman. He sets his palms to either side of his ribcage and sweeps them down. The line below his skirts is interrupted by the trousers and is not so pleasing, but above it the dress clings to him from shoulders to hips in a smooth hourglass. The velvet is the softest thing James can remember touching, and the feel of it against his hands wrests a moan from him. James feels himself begin to stiffen. He laughs a little for the shock of it, the most interest he’s had in months. He will sometimes wake up half-hard of a morning, but he has lacked the time or inclination to seek any sort of conclusion.

He will be quick. He keeps his eyes open and trained on the door. His mind cannot settle on any particular line of fantasy, thus he shuffles through a series of fragments he returns to with increasing urgency. Firm hands at his waist, holding fast. The initial burn and shock of being breached. No faces in particular; he has not had a face to bring to mind for years, not since he made lieutenant, though there are a fair few from before he might recall were he to rack his brain. He would be bent double and fucked in this dress, worn properly with underskirts and stays, petticoats voluminous enough to become lost in.

James hazards a small, pained cry and drags his free hand across his chest, fists his skirt to crush the sweaty pile. He does find the looking glass then, and sees high color in his cheeks, bitten lips. There was a girl in Malta his contemporaries liked to visit. James demurred of course, but he oft admired her painted mouth and cheeks, the dark fall of her hair, the same shade as his own. And now he pictures a rough, admiring hand against his own cheek, thumbing at his own vermillion lip. James has made himself so pretty. And now the hands hard at his waist again, the blunt instrument driving home. He loves it. It is shameful. He loves it—

James finishes and flops against the trunk with a groan. He has applied himself so thoroughly that the back of his neck is damp with sweat. He ventures beneath the velvet and finds he has quite ruined its underside, having lacked the foresight to bring out his handkerchief. He wipes his hands. His heart flaps about in his chest like a bat and when he stands his vision swims so he has to grasp at the wall to keep from stumbling.

When he leaves the hold, he bundles the dress inside Brittania’s toga. He passes Le Vesconte on the stairs and claps him on the shoulder. “Pickings grow slim down there, old man,” he says. “I can hardly wait to see what you come up with.”

* * *

James and Francis have adjacent tents, but they have been sharing two cots pushed together since the first night of the march. Like the men, they are cold and have want of company. When they aren’t bone tired they sit and talk over the minutiae of the day, lists and the like, dull and comforting. They still have tea and Jopson to fetch it. Francis lets him go after he pours. _Leave it for the morning, Thomas,_ he says. James has long given Bridgens leave to berth wherever in the camp he likes, as the man has elsewhere to go. Jopson, on the other hand, seems to draw solace from serving Francis, and would be wounded were he told to set his duties aside.

James sits on his cot and winces, coaxing a swollen foot out of his boot. He cannot remember any distinction between days beyond what rituals they still move through to open and close them. They do not undress to sleep, falling beside one another in their crusty slops and mufflers, dragging blankets over top. They do not take their boots off lest some peril befall them in the night and require their quick arousal. But ceaseless scrambling over rocks has caused James’s boot to rub a place on one sole raw. He eases the boot off, strips free a vile-smelling woollen sock and presents his foot for Francis’s inspection. Friction has raised a pearly blister, tense with fluid.

“Give it here,” Francis says. He holds James’s foot in his lap, unperturbed by its grim condition, and prods the blister with a fingertip.

“Best to lance and drain it,” James says. “I have a roll of plaster in my pack.”

Walking overland he learned how best to care for such things, though then there was no risk of wounds failing to close. As it is, though, he is hobbled, and so he leans to grab his pack, which holds his allotted tin of medical supplies. Francis finds a sewing needle. When he sets it to James’s foot the relief is immediate, and James gives a grunt that makes Francis smile and run his thumb along James’s arch, which is white and clammy as the belly of a fish.

James wriggles his toes. The nail of the biggest one is blackening. “Not so long ago I gave three days duty owing for cleaner than these,” he says by way of apology.

“I am as filthy as you. And I won’t have you lame, James. For want of a nail the shoe is lost, et cetera.”

James hums. Francis wraps his foot with the deftness of a surgeon. For the first time all day James is not precisely warm, but tolerably cold and sitting in something approaching comfort. It is in this intoxicating lull, Francis fussing with his bandage, that James speaks again. He has no excuse for what emerges other than the familiarity that has grown between them lately, between the awful Carnivale and the abandoned ships and now.

“How would you have me?” James asks quietly.

A pause. Francis sets James’s foot down. “Well rested,” he says. He nods at James’s boot. “Put that back on and to bed with you.”

James follows orders, crawling onto the cot and arranging his blankets. He has misstepped. His salvation, if he has it, will come only by the grace of Francis’s willful misinterpretation. He lies still as Francis moves about the tent, sorting, scribbling in a little book with a stub of pencil. When Francis climbs in beside him at last James evens his breathing so Francis will think him asleep already, and they lie in the dark like this for some time. James can hear the wind moan around the tents. He has never known wind to have such character, nor snow, nor ice. He dreams of them sometimes as figures in a play. Wind, snow, ice. A chorus, here to deliver him a message.

“James?”

He starts. He had hoped Francis would have dropped off to sleep directly, but perhaps he too is listening to the chatter and whine of what seems to James to be the halting language of the cold itself.

“Earlier,” Francis says. His voice is soft and probing, sets James on his guard again. “That sounded like some manner of flirtation.”

Oh, damn. James is glad of the darkness; it makes the moments stretch and gives him time to collect himself.

“A kind of—of daydream,” James says finally, dissembling. “I was too much at ease. Exhaustion took me and I forgot myself for a moment.” He conjures one of his old laughs. A mistake, for it bounces around the tent, clings to its center pole conspicuously as ball lightning on a mast.

But when Francis speaks again there is laughter in his voice, too, a burbling, running kind James has not yet heard. “At ease,” he says, as though counting on his fingers. “Overtired. Dreaming. And so tell me, James. Did you dream me into someone else?”

James swallows. He is perturbed for having to discuss it but relieved too, for if Francis guessed the truth he would not press so, would not sound so amused, would not be alluding to some long-lost sweetheart, obviously of the fairer sex. James has not had one of these in his entire life. “Perhaps I did.” 

Francis croaks triumphantly, as though this disclosure has been hard won. Lying beside him James is reminded, somehow, of Sir John, though he can hardly imagine sharing a cot with Sir John Franklin. But Franklin might have acted thus, acted pleased to draw him out. Ironic, for there would have been no need; not so long ago James would have offered up almost anything Franklin asked. And James would in turn have been pleased to locate some kernel of genuine personality in Francis, though Francis-as-he-was would have punished them both soundly for it.

Well, James will take his stab at it, with this new, perplexing Francis, for whom he has come to feel such warmth.

“And you?” James asks. “Do you dream yourself beside Miss Cracroft?”

Francis’s breath stutters so that James feels a stab of real concern. He raises himself up on an elbow. In the darkness he can just make out Francis, who has not expired but is simply holding very still. James worries that he has misstepped again. Perhaps, as insubordination goes, this question is even graver than the last. But Francis sighs, and seems to sink deeper onto the cot. He turns his head towards James, just slightly, as though checking to see if James is watching him. When he sees that he is, he winces.

“At times,” says Francis, “I find I have difficulty remembering who that is.”

James nods. He has never had a sweetheart, but he understands a little of what Francis means. For when he thinks of home and hearth he finds them harder and harder to conjure, to remember that bright rolling country around Rose Hill, to remember once familiar faces. He is aware more keenly than ever that all he has known dwells inside him, a house with a thousand rooms that shift and change from visit to visit. There are rooms kept shut up, and these will fade beyond hope the longer he stays away. Some of them, many of them, he will not regret losing. But he can see that Francis is bereft, that the memory of Sophia Cracroft is a room he has passed long hours in. To find it changed, to find it barred to him—

James reaches for Francis. He rests a heavy hand on Francis’s chest between his sternum and his collarbone. Francis has slimmed, though he is not yet a thin man, and he is wearing copious layers. James fancies he can feel the heartbeat beneath his ribs anyway. His chest is warm, his woolen jumper worn and soft, and James cannot stop his idle thumb from stroking it. Francis’s breathing stills again. And then, slowly, he raises his own hand, sets it down atop James’s. There is an air of gravity between them in the tent. And yet within it James has remained hidden, like a deer that stills before the hunt and is lost to the undergrowth. Unfair, perhaps, when Francis has bared himself, but James cannot help but feel glad of the concealment.


	2. Chapter 2

In Terror Camp, James has been ill at ease all day and continues to brood through the dinner bell. Another time Francis might harry him to eat, but tonight he manages to limit himself to poking his head into the tent and ducking out again when James makes no move to join him at the ersatz officers’ table. James has painted himself into a corner; alone in the tent and left to his thoughts he feels worse, but he is enslaved to his pettiness and will not join Francis now he’s made the point of failing to do so already. He huffs about the tent, sitting, leaning, unable to be comfortable. His eyes dwell too long at the corners of the canvas, carving darkling shapes from the shadows cast by the lanterns.

He has brought little reading material. No Bible; James has not allowed for that weight for some time, and anyway he has Francis to pen their services as is a captain’s prerogative. He cannot write or draw, cannot trust himself not to put some strange imaginings to paper to be discovered later, and a letter is too dispiriting. He has a slim volume on magnetics, which he opens and stares at, but he cannot focus and sets it down after only a few minutes.

For lack of anything else to do, he sees to his injuries. He has gone about with his slops rubbing against them for hours. He has told Francis of his illness, has told Francis of so many things, but he would still retain a modicum of privacy in this besetment of his body. He checks the flaps of the tent before he braces against the cold and strips. He inspects his arm first, the twin wounds there and then their triplet at his torso. James is keeping a grim catalogue of hurts. He has his bullet holes and scores of bruises, which dapple him in red and purple and will not fade to yellow, replenished as they are with new blood beneath the skin. Around them his pallid flesh bears undertones of grey. He is as cold as marble and as hard, for he has long lost whatever extra weight he left England with, his muscles wasted into wire bundles wrapped about his bones. James is a blade. He stabs and hacks through the days.

He sits before the little shaving glass. From this angle, his bare neck appears unmarred. He looks on it each morning when he shaves, which is a small and particular joy. He no longer asks Bridgens to shave him but has taken it over himself, for he relishes the ability to reclaim some scrap of dwindling mastery over his body.

At Rose Hill when he was young he ate lustily, ran about lustily. He recalls pelting down hills head over tail and leaping from trees. He used his body from dawn to dusk as though he would never be required to treat it carefully. He loved Will Coningham with unusual force, like the love of a stray dog for his new master’s house. He felt this love in his body too, in the beat of his heart as they hid together in some quiet place, other children seeking them, hands clasped as they tried to stanch their giggles. And later in the dark, with a governess hovering outside the nursery door. _Boys, go to sleep_. At night he would wake, Will in his arms or he in Will’s, sweating, having had some dream, and they would lie together whispering until it faded. But there was always the promise of another morning, and a body that would face it robustly until the day James took it to sea.

He was a boy and then a man at sea because they all were, because at sea the only woman is the ship herself. He grew belowdecks and on rigging into a strapping, nimble creature. On leave at Rose Hill his boy’s clothes no longer fit. He had new muscles and strange speech in his mouth. One summer day he swam with Will in the river and Will looked at James and then down at himself. I don’t recognize you, he said. What you are.

James finds a pot of salve and applies it to the worst of the sores, dabs at their weeping surfaces with a plaster, affixes a fresh bandage to his bad arm. Then he dresses again. There is a fumbling motion at the tent flaps and Francis comes inside, a cautious look on his face as though he expects James to throw him out. But James’s anger is gone, leaving the usual exhaustion and melancholy in its wake.

Francis nods at the medical kit. “All set to rights?”

“As I will ever be,” James says. “And the lieutenants?”

“As they will ever be,” says Francis.

“I ought to have come with you. Morale is thin enough without my retreating in some fit of pique.”

Francis smiles and sits beside him on the cot. He picks up the shaving glass and holds it out to catch the light from the lantern. The effect is alchemical, glass meeting lamplight to become a disc of gold. It reminds James of the sun, a kind of sun he has not seen in years. The sun in Malta, in the Middle East, that would seep in and scorch your very bones. 

“I have had a thought,” Francis says. “The lieutenants are worn thin. I believe I know a way we might bolster them, if you are not averse to a slight breach of protocol.”

“Sounds rather exciting,” James says, and bumps against Francis’s shoulder with his own. Already he feels lighter with Francis here, and the contact is worth the bloom of pain it leaves in its wake.

“I have thought of promoting Jopson,” says Francis, a shade of hesitation in his voice. He offers his explanation in a rush, as though he is expecting James to try and refute it. “Practically I think it sound. He has the officers’ confidence, or my own to vouch for him. He is familiar with the workings of the wardroom, theoretical as it is—”

“And you like him, Francis. You may say it.”

Francis reddens. “He deserves recognition for his constancy.”

James is filled with lightness. Here is a plainly happy thought on a day he had not looked for one. “It is irregular,” James begins, and Francis watches his face. How intriguing that he should care what James thinks. James once wished so fervently for Francis’s esteem; now that he has it he vows to husband it like a rare flower. “Irregular, but an altogether fine idea.”

Francis coughs. “Good,” he says. “I am pleased you agree. I thought to call a meeting at the top of the forenoon watch.” He scrubs a hand down his face, and at once looks quite tired.

“Does something trouble you, Francis?” And he checks Francis with his shoulder again, as though to say: beyond the interminably obvious. For you are always troubled, and I would have your trouble if I thought I could carry any more.

“No trouble, James. Only that we are still awake, and that I believe we had the last of the tea this morning.”

* * *

James has begun to see things that aren’t there.

The phenomenon occurs mostly when hauling, a convenience for how readily he ascribes all his innumerable ills to dragging a boat over the rattling shale. He is happy to add it to the list—the ache of his joints, the way his muscles sometimes seize up and sometimes wobble like a blancmange. He can feel Francis’s eyes on him at every misstep. The gaze rankles, and if James is being honest the visions are a welcome distraction.

“We’ll break for the day,” Francis calls.

James barely hears him; he has his eyes on the horizon. Before it, in the middle distance, sits the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

“James.”

Francis grabs at his upper arm to still him. The rest of the men have stopped in their tracks, did so at the first order, so James has stepped blithely on against the full weight of the suddenly stationary boat. The abrupt shift pitches him forward and back. He is dull with exhaustion, not quick enough to right himself, and goes down hard on a knee. Immediately there is warm, wet pain and he knows when he inspects the wound later he will be peeling his trousers away from his ruined skin. He looks up at the Pavilion, shimmering like a great white wedding cake. Salt and iron in his mouth.

“Do you see that, Francis?” 

Francis ignores him. He has knelt beside James and is stripping off the hauling straps. He pulls James against him to do so, to get the weight off the injured knee. “Pitch the tents,” he calls over his shoulder.

“We haven’t got far enough,” James says.

“Far enough for today.”

“How do you expect us to make—”

“Captain Fitzjames.”

The title is a caution, but a toothless one with James gathered in his arms. Francis has become trenchant in his care for them. James is grateful for it with the men, but cannot cope when he finds it turned upon himself. He flaps his arms at Francis until he moves away. He stands back, amusement and concern warring on his face. He holds one mittened hand out. James accepts it, allows Francis to pull him to his feet. James tests his weight; the knee is sore but intact, the pain dulled to join the gnawing, ground-glass ache that is always present in his knees, hips, elbows. As expected, blood has seeped through his slops.

“Go and have that cleaned up,” Francis says.

James grunts. The last thing he wants to do is join the shambling queue in the sick tent, where Bridgens doles out whatever Goodsir left behind: salves, mandragora, spoonfuls of coca wine that yield a brief artificial energy. These are palliatives only; there is nothing in his stores that will cure what ails them. If the men at large do not see it, James does. He would not begrudge the men the illusion of treatment, but he cannot abide it personally.

Francis must see his reluctance. He sighs, clearly put upon. “James—”

They stand apart, the men having dispersed to organize the tents. In relative privacy James allows temper to overtake him. “You worry at me like a dog with a bone,” he snaps. “I put a foot wrong. I’ve skinned my knee. Nothing more. I will see to it myself.”

Francis holds his hands up, and allows James to stalk off towards the rising tents without another word. As he goes he looks past Francis for the Pavilion, but it is no longer there.

* * *

“I’m dying, Francis,” James says.

This is a fact he has been considering for several days, turning it over in his mind like a stone. He imagines he has thought of it so loudly Francis may have heard him anyway, and thus the statement will not be news to him. Of course it won’t be; any man would look upon James and see that he is dying, though he supposes it is one thing to know a man is dying and another to know that he knows.

Francis has been beside him for some time. The hours have begun to drag, or else to spin by double-time. He is never aware of the day, of what the rest of the camp is doing. They have stopped and they are waiting. Francis is waiting with him. James is glad of it, impossibly glad. He’d heard a murmur from his cot—they thought to leave the sick behind, all those too weak to walk or haul, too pained to ride. When James heard this, he had begun to cry. He had lain alone in the tent for a long time, so long to his mind he was certain they had gone. And he had cried like a child, for Francis had not come to say good-bye.

When Francis had come back into the tent at last, James was so pleased to see him he struggled to sit, and Francis had gentled him, run hands over his shoulders. They would wait, he said. And James ought to rest, and when he was a little stronger they would move on again.

Francis sighs. “Ah,” he says. There is a hand in James’s hair.

They give him draughts for pain, feed him from one of the accursed tins. His tongue is raw, to eat and drink an agony, though his throat is tight with thirst and he begs for water. “Are there no spirits?” Francis asks Bridgens. “Can he not be--” But James is not Thomas Blanky. He can take no rag between his teeth. James wants to tell Francis that if he could lose a limb and be shut of this thing, he would offer any of the four without question, but he cannot get the words past his swollen tongue.

He whispers to Francis, when they are alone. Francis has to kneel beside the cot to hear him. “Do you fear judgment?” James asks.

“I don’t think of it. You ought not to, either.”

“I must,” James says. Then, in a rush: “I do fear it.”

“You are a good man, James.”

“Francis, I would make you my confessor.” He gropes for the front of Francis’s shirt. The tent is dim, else his eyes are failing him too. There is a single, jaundiced lamp flickering somewhere.

Francis is close enough that his words stir the air against James’s cheek. “We are not here yet,” he says.

His words are a plea, but James nods. They are here. His body is dissolving. The latticework of his vessels and his bones has been unbraided. He is nothing but unscreened pain, and he attempts to clear some corner of it aside to let the words through. He has rehearsed this moment. He fears death, yes, and God. But James is no longer afraid of this.

“I have never loved a woman as you love Miss Cracroft,” he says.

Francis frowns. He finds James’s hand at his breast and tangles their fingers together with the rough linen of his shirtsleeves. “James, you must not worry.”

James swallows. He has no vigor left to make Francis understand. In desperation he applies his scant weight to their joined hands, yanking at Francis’s shirt, pulling him closer still. He looks up into his face. When James speaks he can smell himself. His tongue is a rotten lump of meat. “Hear me, Francis,” he says slowly. “I have never loved a woman as you love Miss Cracroft.”

Francis exhales. Mercifully, he does not drop James’s hand, but sets it beside him on the cot and leaves his own atop it. “Why would you tell me this?”

“You know everything else.”

Francis is quiet for some time, but he does not take his hand from James’s. He appears, to James’s languishing eye, to be deep in thought. If Francis is to condemn him, James wishes he’d get on with it. As he waits he begins to count out his heartbeats. They shiver and skip. Is this one beat, or two or three? How many more will be allowed him? His quivering heart disturbs him, and he stops and lies idle again.

“Well,” Francis says at last. “I am honored by your confidence. But if you think you are free to die now that you have unburdened yourself, you are much mistaken.” 

Francis sounds quite determined. His tone amuses James, and he might laugh if he were able. But as it is, he can only lie still and feel a tear wend its way from the corner of his eye. Francis mops it with a shirttail, and they sit in silence together until James sleeps.

What comes next, he does not remember. He has coaxed it out of Francis over time and under some duress, so he has pieced it together in his own brain like a series of tableaux. He begins to have fits, so badly he flails half out of the cot and onto the floor. Bridgens and Francis hold him down lest he injure himself any further. He is told he bleeds from the mouth, the nose. He cries tears of blood. He ceases to eat and Francis dribbles melted ice down his throat. He is certain his body releases all manner of liquid horrors, but he does not press Francis for details of these.

Later, Francis tells him soberly of the night he’d marked as James’s last. That night James had begged for death, begged Francis to ease the way for him. Francis had dismissed Bridgens, who had given over a bottle of poison and instructions: here is how you make the work quick. Here is how you kill a body that wants to live even when the soul within does not. When it can bear the pain of living no longer.

Francis tries. He works the poison down James’s clasping throat. James spasms and repels it. He cries out, betrayed, and Francis, when he pulls James to him, is crying too. “You asked how I would have you,” Francis says, murmuring into James’s hair. “I would have you whole as you were in the wardroom before we met the pack. Arrogant, I thought. Hateful. We are brothers now but I would have you remain to me as you were then, if it kept you from this.”

James cannot answer him, but if he could he would say this: he does not agree with Francis. Of course James would prefer not to be dying. He has left his vanity out here somewhere on the ice, but if he hadn’t he would surely prefer the James Fitzjames whom Francis is describing. Epaulettes and stories. Where are his epaulettes? James cannot recall the last time he saw a spangle, a spot of brightness that was not a fevered eye or the merciless stars. And where are his stories? All spun out. He has forgotten them. They belong to a different man. Francis talks in hypotheticals, but James is past their mercy. When he dies, he will die in the arms of his brother, and he would not take it back.

Some time in the night there is movement, noise. If James has any awareness of this it is only that Francis rises from his side. Perhaps the officer come to call (Little, or a newly promoted Jopson) reddens at the sight of them piled together, but more likely he sees and understands. Perhaps the shimmering desperation of the room whets his tongue, and when he speaks James is sure he is joyous, for the whole camp but particularly for Francis, for his words will slip inside of Francis and apply themselves like a poultice to his heart.

“Captain Crozier,” he says. “Sir, we are found.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Tell me,” James says. “You must have an answer.”

“I have no answer,” Francis says.

Francis glowers from his berth, where he roosts with legs crossed before him. James’s cabin on _Erebus_ was not exactly spacious, but he hasn’t been in quarters quite so cramped as this for years, which means for Francis it has been still longer. But they are packed to the gills on _HMS Formidable_ , sailing back to England, and cannot—as the saying goes—be choosers. They share this cabin, two berths on opposite walls. If they sat facing one another their knees would knock together. 

James cannot remember ever having been so comfortable. 

“It’s a simple question, requiring but a simple answer. Were you a pudding, what pudding would you be?”

“You remain addled by scurvy,” Francis groans. “James, I despise parlour games.” 

James laughs. 

“Oh, you are truly joyless, Francis. I am quite addled, and you will not even humour me. Hmm. You would be something stodgy and steamed, I should think. Containing raisins. Do you know, before we first sailed I went to a dinner at Sir John’s, and the cook brought out something called a Franklin cake. Lady Jane was quite delighted. It was a sort of gingerbread—”

Francis has stopped listening, staring off into the corner of the room. When James first awoke beside a Netsilik fire, when he was first aware that he might live, the first thing his eyes landed upon was Francis in repose, face lit by flame, looking as absent and haunted as he does now. To see him James had felt a particular pain, quite apart from the trials of his depleted body. He feels its echo in the cabin, however many miles from that first lonely snow house. He does not know their position. He does not command this ship, and so he is not tasked with exactitudes.

He does not bother to call Francis back; he supposes the man is due his lapses. James himself will often pause in the middle of some task, having quite forgotten what he was doing. They are all wearing piecemeal uniforms, and the first morning he was obliged to dress in something besides his filth-encrusted slops or the furs in which the Netsilik had swaddled him he found he had forgotten how to do it, and had to be assisted by a tearful Bridgens.

“You’ll pardon me, sir,” he’d said. “Only I am powerfully pleased to be serving you again. I thought I’d seen the last of you in that tent. And Captain Crozier--”

“Mr. Bridgens,” James said, not unkindly. “Let us not dwell upon it.”

Bridgens had looked away, mumbling an apology.

That James had faltered, and badly, is not a secret. What is, what must remain so, is what transpired between himself and Francis. If Bridgens heard of anything of their muttered absolutions, James has no doubt the man will keep his silence. What troubles James is Francis, the inner state of him. For, James thinks, it is one thing to consider acts of mercy in a man’s darkest hour and another to look on them in retrospect with that same man alive before you. When he loses Francis to the corner of a room, to a look of utter vacancy, James imagines these are the character and flavor of his thoughts. Were it possible, James would build a great fortification to protect them from those who might come looking. He would task himself with the keeping of the keys.

Francis lifts his head and looks at James, as though he has been listening intently all along. “Well?”

James lifts his eyebrows. “Well, what?”

Francis snorts. “People only pose such ridiculous questions in order to reveal their own answers. I am sure you have considered yours, and would not be so cruel as to deprive you of the telling. So,” Francis beckons towards him. “Were you to be transformed into a pudding, what sort of pudding would you be?”

He makes a face, as though the question tastes unappealing. James has a sudden flash of Francis at the fireside, chewing at a hunk of seal’s liver. He had pulled it from his mouth, well macerated, and offered it to James between his fingers.

James arranges his face into a smile. He can see from Francis’s answering expression that he thinks it genuine, unclouded. “That is easy,” says James triumphantly. He has indeed considered his answer. “I would be a syllabub, as I quite like the word. Or perhaps a trifle. Or an _île flottante._ “

“An _île flottante._ You are an incurable fop.”

James is not certain he can still be a fop with a handful of teeth missing from his head, or the frightful state of his hair, great hanks of which had matted to his scalp and required aggressive trimming with Bridgens’ dull scissors. Leave aside his wardrobe, of which the best that can be said is that it is mostly clean. He tells Francis so, and Francis shakes his head.

“You have that foppish bearing still,” he says. “Had it even at the last. A season back in London and you will have recovered it fully.”

Francis stands then, contorting to get out of his berth. He stretches, lifting his arms over his head. “I never thought I would grow unused to a ship,” he says. “I was seasick, leaving Halifax. Seasick! I weathered a hurricane off the coast of South America in fifty foot seas without the barest hint of green, and yet here I am retching over the side.”

“Perhaps you have become a walker like me,” James says. “Did I ever tell you of my grand plan to break with the expedition after we found the passage? I meant to race you home overland, across Russia. I wanted to bring the news to London first.”

“So eager to be rid of us?”

“Eager for something,” James says.

Glory, probably. Glory would have spurred him on, a fire in his belly, in his chest. James had had his walk after all, and there had indeed been a fire inside him then. But it had burned with a different heat. It smoldered, and he had to stoke it daily lest it lose its air and smother. Live, he would remind himself. I want to live.

He must suddenly look quite morose, because Francis sits beside him, reaches out and pats him on the knee. James looks up to find Francis with a hooded expression on his face. “I have something for you,” Francis says. “I had forgotten about it until just now.” He leans beneath the berth and pulls out a dun-colored bundle, stained and tattered. James recognizes it immediately, finds himself getting to his feet, crowding Francis in the scant space between their two beds.

“My pack. Francis, how did you get this?” He grabs for the canvas and Francis gives it over readily, looking pleased with himself.

“I carried it with us when we left with the Netsilik. It contained your medicine kit, and I thought we might have need of it.” He sits back again, this time beside James.

The Netsilik who found them were of two minds regarding James. Francis told him of a great row they had, an older healer and his young apprentice, although apparently to the English ear it had been more a muffled, sternly worded debate. The older healer thought to haul James back to their camp, while the younger thought him too weak. _He declared you would expire along the way,_ Francis told him. _For my part I agreed. At last they settled it, and the elder won. I was furious, and had to be restrained by poor Ned Little. But he was right, the healer. You thrived in that snow house. It was there you opened your eyes for the first time in days, and told me I looked frightful._

The pack is knotted closed. James works the ties free and shortly finds himself faced with a bag full of relics. He feels as though he is looking at something centuries old, though of course he packed this bag less than six months ago. Here is the medicine kit. He can recall sitting on a cot, Francis worrying over his blister. Here is his journal, the last of them. He had left its predecessors to gather dust on his desktop on _Erebus_ , knowing he could not spare the weight. He pages through it. He neglected the journal on their walk; the last entry, after Carnivale, is but a list of men’s names. But earlier he lands upon a two page spread in pencil. He has sketched _Terror_ as seen from _Erebus_ ’s deck, her great aft haunch curving up out of the pack. He cannot remember when he was last idle enough to sit with paper and pencil, and he did not date the page to remind himself. At any rate he would not have risked the cold to draw from life, which means he must have made the picture in his berth, or at the desk. Either way, from memory.

Francis makes a small sound, and James looks up in time to see a soft look come into his eyes.

“May I?”

James hands the book over. Francis takes it as carefully as he might a wounded bird. “I would not have guessed you for an artist,” he says.

“It’s nothing,” James says.

“It is a perfect likeness.”

James has often been called proud, including by the man who sits before him, but now there is something like wonder in Francis’s voice and James finds it difficult to hear. He does not know where his artistic inclinations come from. If he thinks too hard on them he begins to suspect they come from that dark part that is essentially him, that part he has shown only to Francis. This disturbs him, so he turns his attention back to his satchel. Relieved of the journal and the medicine kit it is quite light, but he can still feel something tamped down along the bottom. He reaches for it, unsure what he will find, and draws his hand back full of velvet, dull in the cabin’s poor light but as soft as the day he first pulled it out of the costume chest. And other days besides, as James recalls. He stares at the wadded dress on his lap and wills the blush to fade from his cheeks before he faces Francis again.

“That is a curious addition to a man’s traveling pack,” says Francis. “Has it some sentimental value?” 

James tells him a cousin of the truth. “I thought to wear it to Carnivale,” he says, making his voice wry. “I chose differently in the end, of course, but afterwards I felt moved to bring it with me. Half reminder, and half…wish, I suppose. That there might yet be some gaudy time to bring it out.”

“There might yet,” says Francis. He fingers the velvet himself, his expression thoughtful.

“Is it true you and Sir James Ross danced a quadrille on an iceberg?”

“James Ross is a capital dancer,” Francis says. “Most men find it difficult to follow.” He sighs, and casts a glance at James. “Would that the greatest spectacle at our Carnivale were the two of us limping through a quadrille.”

“Limping? Speak for yourself, man. I have no trouble following. We would have been all grace.”

They fall silent. Perhaps Francis feels as James does: that it does not feel as wrong to be mirthful as one might have expected. Time has allowed them to look past the pain to glimpse a sliver of light. Another past, a different place. James and Francis waltzing beneath the aurora.  
But as James watches, Francis’s expression grows more distant, more troubled. He shifts and tuts, and draws his fingers to and fro on the nap of the velvet to make anxious patterns. His thoughts have strayed from Carnivale; this can be seen plainly on his face, and fills James with disquiet.

“Speak your mind, Francis,” he says, when he can bear it no longer.

“What you told me,” Francis begins. He sounds apologetic. He can only be speaking of one thing.

James should perhaps have seen this coming. At first he could scarcely remember saying the words, but as he recovered he would find them swimming up to him at odd moments. I have never loved a woman. Francis so close, his breath on James’s face. Again hearing words James had never spoken to anyone, again absorbing them with both aplomb and tenderness, with the promise that they might be rendered, if not acceptable, then at least inert. This is more than James deserves, certainly. And—what might this knowledge do to Francis? He should have considered earlier. Might it wound him? James could not abide it.

He holds up a hand. “I would not have you speak further on it,” he says. “I disclosed it under greatest duress. I believed myself at death’s door, else I should never have saddled you with it. Of course your discretion is appreciated—”

“I’d never tell.”

“Thank you,” James says. “That is all I require. Other than for you to accept my gratitude for allowing me to indulge myself.”

“I saw no indulgence that night,” mutters Francis. “I saw only a man dismantled. Ship-broke.”

James swallows. Shipbreakers drag their quarry out to sea to be sunk, or burnt to charcoal. This last feels correct to him when he thinks of those final nights in the tent, waiting for death. He felt then as though he had been burned away entirely, discorporated thus, so that what lay in that filthy cot was a body only in its most cursory, its most rudimentary form. He had not been a man then. He had been all thoughts.

He cannot think of how to answer Francis, so he leans back in his berth and changes the subject. “Will you sleep?” he asks. “I shall put the lamp out if you are.”

Francis rises. “Are you tired?”

James does tire easily these days. He is still too thin, and has had difficulty regaining his appetite. All food seems to taste the same, and despite his inclination to talk of puddings he feels ill when confronted with sweets. He is not particularly tired, though when the light is out and the ship rocking beneath him he will readily fall asleep.

“I am,” he says to Francis. “I’m sure you’re disappointed to end our parlour games.”

Francis looks as though he wants to say something, but he does not. He puts on his greatcoat and hat. “I’ll go walk the deck awhile,” he says. “Goodnight, James.”

When he is gone James readies himself for bed, but he does not turn the lamp out yet. Instead he rummages for a stub of pencil, finds a blank page in his recovered journal, and begins to sketch two figures, dancing.

* * *

They have been back in London almost a month when George Barrow calls on James.

He has taken rooms in the city for lack of any better idea, and because they are still awaiting the date and time of the inevitable court martial. Will Coningham has issued him an open invitation, and the sensible thing would be to take him up on it. But even the spare, cramped flat he’s let feels overlarge, difficult to fill after so long on a ship, so long in the wastes. The thought of a large house, surrounding acreage, the promised wing of his own, makes him shiver. The other reason he is reluctant to leave London is just as difficult to admit and impossible to articulate to anyone, so James keeps it to himself to stew over, to thumb like a sore knot in muscle. He stays in London so it will be easier for Francis to find him.

When the knock comes on his door on this particular night, just gone ten o’clock, James’s heart gives a hopeful leap. On _Formidable_ Francis scarcely slept; after James retired he would pace the deck until dawn, and James would frequently awaken to find his bed undisturbed, Francis already taking his breakfast in the mess. Since returning James too has found his sleep troubled, besieged by nightmares he cannot later remember. He can see the appeal of Francis’s nighttime peregrinations, and tonight, when the knock sounds, he thinks that perhaps he has decided at last that their orbits should intersect once more. When he opens the door to Barrow, grinning and holding out his hands, James must actively prevent his face from falling.

“At last!” Barrow cries. “I have called twice before. Your landlady refused to let me up. Then I thought to come late, when she was abed.”

James pays her a premium on top of his rent for tea and supper, and a little extra besides to invent strict as-needed policies on callers. He made himself look quite the fool attempting to describe Francis in order to make him an exception, and he is not certain he got the point across. When he calls on Francis—and he will call on Francis, he vows, one day soon—he half expects to hear he too has been turned away.

“You are abroad quite late,” James says.

“Nonsense,” says Barrow. “It’s barely ten. Why, we would scarcely be sitting down to dine in the old days. A whole night ahead of us. Anyway, I have come to drag you out, Fitzjames. A month you’ve been back in London and you’ve not sought me out. I was beginning to be offended.”

“I have been busy,” says James weakly.

“Pish. You’ve not even been court-martialed yet. And surely you can’t be shut up in here awash with nerves over that. It will be a formality at best.”

“I suppose.”

“Of course it will, and we’ll have no more talk of it. You’ll put on something fit for public consumption, and then the two of us will go out. Ought we to call on Dundy, and have a proper reunion?”

“Le Vesconte is in the country,” says James, thinking privately that Barrow and Le Vesconte scarcely had a union to resume in the first place, that like James he had found George Barrow quite insufferable. Unlike James, however, Le Vesconte had had no professional stake in continuing to court his friendship.

James believes himself beyond vanity, but perhaps old habits are not so quick to die. For this reason or some other—boredom, perhaps, or loneliness—he does not dismiss Barrow. He goes to his wardrobe and selects a fine grey suit, purchased just the other day on impulse. It is not bespoke; James had become hot and overcrowded in the front room of the tailor’s, and unable to wait to have his measurements made. He had bought this suit from out of the window instead, the assistant who took his payment looking askance at his sudden sweaty brow, the quick breaths he drew and his haste to leave.

In the looking glass and from Barrow’s expression he can see the suit fits well. Say what you will of scurvy, James thinks, but he still cuts a fine figure. He pairs the dove grey with a waistcoat of lilac, which matches his cravat and the trim of his top hat. Barrow does a poor job of concealing a look which might be envy or might be hunger. Either, James thinks, will do. By the time they go out into the clustering fog, he has begun to be, if not excited, then at least anticipatory. George Barrow is not James’s first choice of partner for a night out, but he cannot be said to be boring.

They set out across London, Barrow leading the way. For a man who escaped having his throat cut in a brothel in Singapore by the skin of his teeth, Barrow has never seemed to feel the need to be particularly discreet. James has been nearly four years gone but he can see already that nothing has changed in the interim. Barrow still keeps dubious company, still spends his nights in iniquitous places. James had been sure things would go bad for him somehow; it was only a question of when, and to what degree. If he sometimes felt a little like a circling vulture, he soothed himself with the knowledge that, when it happened, he might be there to prevent it, and if there was some benefit for him as a result, then it was only James’s due.

George’s secret, he wrote once, is safe with me. Barrow might have included a postscript: And James Fitzjames’s, with me. Each knows far too much about the other. James fears only death will fully disentangle them. 

“You’ll love this place,” says Barrow. “Take you right back to those filthy little side streets in Nanking. God, that sweet smoke. You could eat it out of the air like candy floss. And the boys there, Fitzjames, do you remember how lissome? Twice so, here. And English to boot. I swear I’m half in love with one of them. He will be the ruin of me.”

“Keep your voice down.”

Barrow is chattering away as though he’s talking about the weather. He waves his hand at James as if to say, who cares. The fog around them is so dense and yellow they can see no one else on the street, and the air seems to eat up all sound. James can hardly hear his own boots on the cobbles. It is easy to see how Barrow must feel untouchable. Days insulated by his father’s money and influence. Nights in the London fog, where he might come and go unnoticed. Had he even needed James in Singapore? Perhaps it had been a game to him all along. The boy bleeding and crying. The cruel blade tucked against Barrow’s windpipe. The boy’s hand shaking as James took hold of it at the wrist, pressed just so on the tendons there to release his grip on the knife handle. Barrow had taken something from the boy, James remembers, picked his pockets of some memento. Barrow, who had everything.

Barrow leads them down an alley that is even darker than the main thoroughfare. When they slip through a partially broken-down stone wall James can see they have come out along the river, the heavy stink of it rising up around them. Here there are a series of long buildings, boathouses, maybe, and it is to one of these that Barrow leads him, tucked next to the dark water of the Thames beside a floating barge whose windows are blacked out. From inside the barge James can see a warm glow, as though the thing is a piece of coal in the belly of a fire. Carnivale, he thinks. How he went out to see the tent that night, the same crimson burning against the blue ice. It would burn brighter still before long.

“What is this place?” he asks Barrow, who only smiles and leads him up to the door.

The barge is a floating tavern. James can see immediately why Barrow recalled Nanking; there is indeed a heaviness to the air here he remembers from that city, and from Singapore as well. Like burnt sugar. Barrow steps before him and knocks on the door in a curious pattern. A Chinese woman answers, and regards them with some measure of suspicion. She is richly dressed, though the room beyond her is so close she has little need of clothing. She wears a silver, silken robe, lashed with a belt around her thin frame. Her feet are covered only in soft slippers of a matching fabric. Her hair is oiled and arranged artfully on her head. She draws closer in the fog and seems to mark Barrow, for she nods once and opens her hand to receive his offered coin. Something in her bearing puts James in mind of Lady Silence. Silna, to her people. Perhaps it is her look of unveiled disdain.

“For both of us,” says Barrow.

“I say,” said James. “You can’t think I’ll let you pay for me.”

“Of course you’ll let me. I still owe you a debt, Fitzjames. You weaseled your way out of accepting any sort of remuneration after the...incident in question. It is the least I can do to see to it you have a smile on your face by the time the sun rises over the Styx here.” He turns back to the woman. “And anything he needs inside, too, hmm?” The woman does not respond, only stands aside so they may enter.

The first thing James notices is that all the lamps in the place glow red. The walls are hung with red and gold lanterns. In the low light he can make out an ornately carved wooden bar, behind it a hatless man in a dark suit, polishing a glass. There is a strange music in the air, from the hand of an unseen player. Men sit along the bar like birds on a roof, nodding their heads. At first James thinks they are moving in time to the music, but as he looks longer he recognizes their slowness. The floors of the tavern are strewn with cushions and low couches, and resting on them are more men in varying states of somnolence. They have smoked or eaten opium, and James has not seen their like in London before.

Beside him Barrow looks thrilled. “Isn’t it marvelous, Fitzjames? I should never have thought to find a place like this here.”

James does not think it especially marvelous, but he does not say as much to Barrow. He grins reflexively and allows himself to be escorted to a divan, a glass of wine pressed into his hand.Presently they are approached by two young men bearing trays. They are both slim, clad scantily in silk singlets that skim the tops of their thighs. One of them has hair like James’s before he cut it, though he wears it styled into coiled ringlets. It falls dark and lustrous to his collarbone. The other is fair, and to see Barrow’s face, this is the particular object of his affections. The fair man smiles to see him, and Barrow kisses his cheek, murmurs something in his ear that makes him laugh and flush. James has met men like these, how they can control the very blood in their veins. He had once been impressed with it, willing to play along in the name of a good time, but he finds himself uncomfortable, and when the dark haired man sets a careful hand on James’s knee he starts and jerks away.

“Steady on,” the man says, laughing. “First time?”

“Nonsense,” says Barrow, leaning over, yawping over the melodic din of the room. “Fitzjames here is an old hand. Though he’s a bit out of practice, aren’t you, James? Be slow with him.”

“Of course, sir.”

And James sees how the man takes the direction with his whole body, right away. His smile is softer. He slouches. A sort of contortionist, he thinks. James recognizes him in kind.

The fair man pours a measure of liquid opium into a little jeweled spoon and offers it to Barrow, who takes the spoon between his teeth and tilts his head back. His dark haired partner nods at James, who shakes his head. He shrugs and takes James’s share himself. James wonders if that will come out of his salary later, or if perhaps whoever runs this place keeps its boys in opium the way the dens in China did, knowing they will not leave and risk withdrawal.

Barrow shuts his eyes and gives a low moan, settling back. The fair haired man curls up beside him; James can see from his heavy-lidded eyes he has drunk of the bottle as well. The two begin to kiss lazily, and after a few minutes of this the fair haired man offers Barrow his hand and leads him away, back behind the bar where there are, no doubt, a warren of private and semiprivate rooms.

“We will not see them again tonight,” says the dark haired man. He sits beside James on the divan, curling his feet beneath him delicately as a cat.

“Unfortunate,” says James. “He led us here, and I fear I will be quite lost without him.”

“You’ll just have to stay until dawn then. Or longer. As long as you like. This place is a dream that goes on forever.”

He yawns as though to illustrate the point. His eyes are rimmed with kohl, James notices, his lips stained as though he’s eaten a handful of berries. James feels a twinge within to see the ease with which he sits upon the divan, picking at a bit of gilded stitching. He might be an idle girl in a private moment. There is, to look at him, a kind of yearning.

“You must think me terribly rude,” James says. “I have not asked your name.”

The man smiles. “Kitty,” he says.

“Really?”

“That is rude,” Kitty says. “Yes, really.”

James takes Kitty’s hand, which is small and white, well-manicured as any gentlewoman’s. “James,” he says. “I am enchanted.” 

Kitty takes his hand back and sets it in his lap, and at once they could be two strangers seated beside one another at a dinner party. James has been in that precise situation more times than he can count, yet tonight he feels tongue tied. He is not certain how far the game is meant to go.

“Are you certain you will not partake?” Kitty says, nodding at the opium. “You needn’t be afraid. It is like…like laying yourself down in the finest feather mattress.”

James has not eaten opium before, but he has smoked it, which was the fashion in Singapore. He stumbled into Barrow’s personal disaster on a hazy morning after. When he was younger he had been more given to that sort of wildness, but there had always been parameters; James had not allowed himself the same looseness as his shipmates in matters of the flesh. One could make an evening’s entertainment with ladies of the night, eat and drink and carouse and nearly call it proper, but not so this. Singapore had been a rare exception. He had been more likely to find a few minutes’ pleasure with a like-minded sailor in some portside corner, too dark to see each other’s faces. Taking comfort in a shipmate was both ideal and dangerous; James has always avoided these longer term associations. He has also avoided losing his wits in a whorehouse.

“I will decline again,” James says. “But—” He raises his glass to his lips and drains it, presents the emptied glass to Kitty, who beams and claps. “I will accept another glass of wine.”

The wine warms him, and before too long he finds he can begin to see the appeal of Barrow’s hideaway. It is so tiring, he thinks, to be out there in the world. He could hardly breathe at the tailor’s, and here is just as crowded, but there is a languidness to these rooms that allows James to relax. He removes his hat at last, and Kitty smiles to see him do it.

“There we are,” he says. “He appears. How handsome you are.”

Perhaps it is only this that makes him balk at handsome: that he last heard the word when Francis spat it at him sometime on the ships. He cannot place the moment, only that it was in the wardroom and in company, and he had been so consumed with rage to hear it he had bent a silver fork back onto itself without realizing what he was doing. How Francis could incite him then. He turns from this memory and smiles at Kitty, who slides closer to palm his cheek.

“Drink up, darling,” he says. “I would see all of you there is to see.”

The drink goes down easily, though James can tell it is cheap; such drink usually makes one pay for it later, and he has not had a morning like that in so long. He wishes for friends, true friends, for if he is to have a properly wild night he would have one among them, but none he counts in that category could likely picture him here. Not even Francis, who alone knows James’s inclination. The thought fills James with sorrow, which he chases with more wine, and after awhile it is no great leap to allow Kitty closer and closer until he has James in his arms.

“You live up to your name,” James says.

The man’s mouth is very close, very red. His lashes flutter dark as coal against his cheeks. “And how is that, sir?”

“You look as though you’ve been at the cream.”

“Not yet,” says Kitty.

James kisses him. There is an inevitability to it that feels somehow as comforting as the drink, which has sunk into his limbs and spine, made him warm and pliable. Kitty leads them from the divan and James allows himself to be led, hat tucked beneath his arm. Nobody looks up at them as they pass. Everyone is engaged in their own personal activity; the floor, if watched for long, seems to undulate, and over the music there are breathy sounds and moans of pleasure.

What would decent men think of this? He ought to be ashamed, for he and shame have always been such close bedfellows. But he can only watch with detachment, and think that he is perhaps not decent, that he should watch this scene with so little shock. Are any of them still decent, who were on the ice? They have all seen more carnal horrors than this and lived to tell about it.

Kitty takes them to what passes for a room, a corner partitioned by silks pinned to the ceiling. They sway gently over two pallets, the second of which blessedly does not contain George Barrow or his fair-haired lover. It contains no one at all, and by the time another couple joins them they will be long past caring.

Kitty arranges himself primly on the pallet. He fiddles with the strap of the singlet, parts his legs briefly, almost accidentally, to show that beneath it he is wearing nothing. “Come and sit beside me,” he says, patting, beckoning. “I want to look at you.”

James feels ungainly down on the floor, moreso as Kitty helps him from his jacket and waistcoat, quick fingers on the buttons of his shirt. James cannot speak; he feels as though he has been stopped up. He watches the way Kitty’s singlet moves over his body. The fabric is white as bone and nearly opalescent, and glows pink in the light of the lanterns lining the wall. Kitty is spare, but not ill-kept. His skin is smooth and flushed, not half so marked as James’s. One would not imagine James to have had the harder life, on the face of it, but he’d scaled walls and been shot at, decomposed on the ice and shale while he yet lived. And all along Kitty had not left the embrace of a silken pillow.

“Oh, James,” he breathes, to see the scars from the bullet wounds.

They are deeply purple after their second healing, and quite raised above the skin. He has a firey feeling in that arm that sweeps sometimes from shoulder to fingertips. The surgeon on their rescue ship put him through his paces, made him move his fingers all about, make his hand into a fist. He said the musketball had damaged the nerves in James’s arm, that it had worsened with the scurvy. He thought the pain might lessen but was unlikely to go away entirely. It is mild now, as though James has a handful of sparks, but worsens as Kitty fingers the place where the bullet first entered him. Somewhat poetically, this wound was the last to close.

“Were you badly hurt?”

James nods.

“Shot?”

“Years ago. But then I was ill and the wounds opened up again.”

He draws a shuddering breath, for Kitty has leaned close to him to kiss the scars one by one. He asks for the story but James cannot begin, cannot find the threads of it. And anyway, he does not know where the story ends—not back on the _Cornwallis_ with Dr. Stanley, that is certain, and not in the Arctic either.

They lie on the pallet together, Kitty hovering over him on an elbow. James runs his fingers over Kitty’s body, thrilling at the decadence of silk between the rough skin of his fingers and the finer skin of Kitty’s chest, the liquid shift of it. The roseate light in the room lends a particular loveliness, and the way Kitty lies, like an odalisque, emphasizes the lush curve of his hip. From what James knows of ladies’ underthings, stays would exaggerate this look all the further, and he finds himself wondering if Kitty goes about in women’s fashions, if his whole wardrobe is as fine as this singlet is to James’s eye.

“Do men ever take you for a lady?” The question is posed somewhat breathlessly, and before James has time for better judgement.

Kitty does not take offense, only looks faintly amused. He shrugs.“Men may take me however  
they like. The coin is worth the same.”

“And you? Do you ever—”

He means to ask how Kitty thinks of himself, in the privacy of his own mind. But as he speaks James sees a fleeting look of boredom cross Kitty’s face, which skewers the thought immediately. When Kitty looks askance at him he does not bother to finish his question. Perhaps he has misjudged---perhaps Kitty’s style of dress is only a calculation. At once James feels resoundingly stupid, and heaves a great sigh, dropping backwards onto the palette. He should like to disappear into it, but his hopes are slim.

Kitty leans over him; not party to James’s internal flagellation, he believes events to be unfolding apace. “Yes, that’s right. Lie there and let me take care of you.” He sounds pleased to oblige James. Pleased to be paid, more like, but James never had any illusions about that. No, it is the rest he was drawn in by, too eager to believe like called to like. Kitty kisses his way down James’s bare chest, his belly, which still appears worryingly concave, a shallow bowl between his hip bones. He plucks at James’s trousers. Beneath them James is thoroughly disinterested, and this too makes him feel stupid: how naive, he thinks, to have followed Barrow to such a place as this and expect communion, expect anything other than a single intimate transaction.

Kitty must be used to dealing with recalcitrant members, for he clucks at James’s as he draws it out from his flies as though it is a shy animal in need of encouragement. He spits indelicately in his palm and applies himself to fisting James’s cock, and though the drag of skin on skin is rough the way James likes it he feels little more than a halfhearted pulse of blood in answer. Kitty looks up at him with a raised eyebrow, a gesture almost certainly intended to be coquettish but which only succeeds in reminding James of Francis. He twitches, which Kitty seems to take for a sign of arousal. He grins wide and folds forward, and James realizes with detached alarm that Kitty is about to take him into his mouth, and that he cannot allow it to happen like this, so contrary to what James wants.

James sits up, nearly knocking Kitty over in his haste. God help him, even now he is preoccupied by the flow of the silk as Kitty sits up quickly too, rights a drifting shoulder strap again. 

“What is it?”

“I must take my leave of you,” James says.

“You must be joking.” 

“I regret I am not,” James says. Face aflame, he tucks himself back into his trousers, gathers up his clothing and begins to dress. Kitty leans back on his hands and watches, as though he expects James to come to his senses at any moment. But he does not, and it is only when James has finished, boots to cravat and hat tucked under his arm again, that Kitty stands and sputters.

“But I’ve sat with you all night,” he says, grabbing at James’s arm.

James coughs. They have kissed one another, have nearly lain together, and yet to speak of money seems indelicate. “You might seek out my companion.”

“Oh, he only has eyes for Lil,” Kitty says. “This week, anyway.” He crosses his arms over his chest. “Give me a shilling,” he says.

“A shilling?” James thinks Kitty quite feisty to have eaten opium. Perhaps his tolerance is high.

“I’m hungry,” Kitty says, and bats his eyes. “You have put me in mind of jellied eels.”

There is some insult here. James ignores it and picks through his coin purse. A shilling should be more than sufficient for any food stall, but he is too taken aback to haggle. He hands over the money and Kitty takes it with a sniff, eyeing it with suspicion as though he would like to test it between his teeth. James fights the impulse to snap that it is very real, that he has earned it with sweat and with blood. He cannot blame Kitty. James has not been so much a companion to him as an exercise in poorly invested time. Best for both of them to part on good terms, for James to salvage some scrap of dignity from the evening.

Kitty stalks from the room without so much as a nod, and James allows himself a moment to stand alone, crestfallen. Perhaps he should have tried to enjoy himself, but there could have been no satisfaction tonight. They were not well matched, he thinks. A problem of geometry. His morbing is halted by the intrusion of another couple, who stumble laughing through the curtains and draw up short when they find the room occupied.

“Apologies,” James says, and slips past them. Back at the bar, Kitty has slid onto a stool and appears to be cajoling the bartender. James hopes he will make good use of the shilling.

He is back out on the street again before he remembers he has no idea where to go. He considers returning for Barrow, forcing the man to take him home, but having quit the place he cannot imagine returning. He cuts back along the dirty alley. The fog has lifted slightly, but only because it has turned to rain, a spitting, stinging rain that pelts James in the face beneath the brim of his hat. There is no one on the street, no cabs to be found. He walks on alone, intending to locate a driver to take him back to his lodgings, but as he continues on he does not find one and does not find one and does not find one. He knows only that he goes in roughly the right direction. He has not brought a pocket watch and no bells seem forthcoming in the gloom, so he walks on into what may as well be the end of the world. James would not be surprised to find the entire city has been subsumed around him, so that he walks not a lonely street but a hanging bridge across a bottomless chasm. 

The rain falls harder. He ought not to have come out tonight, for he feels worse than he had at home alone before Barrow had knocked at his door. He recalls the ship home, standing on deck with the men awaiting sight of England on the horizon. James thought he would rejoice to see it, but when the low grey smear of land did materialize he felt nothing, and then to come ashore more nothing still. He had Francis beside him then, but already some veil seemed to have been raised between them; he remembered they had packed up their shared cabin in efficient silence, as though they had not passed countless hours there, letting the ice bleed out of them. James had wanted to say something to Francis to mark the end of it, tell some joke that only they would understand, but he could not think of anything, and the moment passed.

James wants nothing more in his current desolation than to be back in that cabin, to speak to Francis. The wish to do so beats desperately at the heart of him. James decides that he would quite gratefully dispense with the whole of London and possibly humanity altogether, were Francis walking beside him. He would be transported back to that Godforsaken shale on King William Island, with all the worst of its spectres, if only Francis Crozier walked with him upon it.

 _Oh, come to Brighton,_ Will had written him. _We will make a home together as ever we have done, as we did before you went to the Orient._ James does not know how to tell him that things are not the same as they were then, not by a very long shot. What would it mean to make a home with Will and Elizabeth, with their children, his godchildren? Perhaps he will agree to it yet, but he does not believe he is fit for it. He cannot see himself as other than a spot of weakness, a rotten beam that might bring the whole place down around their ears. 

He can imagine no home beyond, ridiculously, the cabin on _Formidable_ , or worse still, the wind-battered tent where he nearly met his end. There is nothing about the fact of these two places that should smell of home for James, nothing about their shape, their architecture. There is only the company he kept within them. 

The understanding that dawns on him is not as shocking as it ought to be. After all, he has lived of a piece with Francis for years. They have been unmade together. James has bled on him, and worse. He has bled on Francis _metaphorically._ Alone on the street, James groans aloud. He is very tired, and feels too weak to go on considering Francis with deeper emotion than wistfulness or curiosity. Yet he persists anyway, his speculation coloured by longing. What might they speak of, were he here? What sardonic comment might Francis offer on James’s behavior in the tavern, on his choice of habiliment?

_Lilac, James? You must have found yourself awfully fettered in Navy blue and cream._

James cannot do this speech justice, cannot make the brogue as rough or as warm as he remembers, and trying raises a blush in his cheeks. This is the longest he has walked since his return to England. He can feel the ghost of scurvy in his joints. He will ache tomorrow. But when he does spot a hansom in the street, its driver dozing at the reins, he does not hail it. He keeps walking until night greys into dawn and at last, in the wet and steely morning, he finds himself at home.


	4. Chapter 4

Predictably, James receives the notice of a court martial the very next day, rising on creaky knees to greet the runner who delivers it.

He has expected this the entirety of the last month, but he still unseals and reads the letter with shaking hands. The summons bears no mention of Francis, if they are to be tried together or apart, and the date is the following morning, scarcely leaving time to find him. So James arrives at Whitehall having slept not at all for two nights running, feeling stiff in his uniform (which he has not worn to full naval standards since some point in early 1848) and entirely uncertain about everything. As he enters the halls of the Admiralty he tries not to stare at each and every figure, but he expects Francis behind every corner, and so he cannot help it.

He is told to wait before a council chamber. For a while he paces, inspecting the portraits of admirals and sea-lords, sometimes painted alone, sometimes before some eponymous feature of geography. Here is Beechey, looking dour with his isle spread out behind him, the hoary berm in whose frozen bosom they left three men. The painting’s title is below, lettered in gold: _The Glory of Discovery._ James finds himself thinking of the Netsilik and amending that word, discovery. If there ever were a passage, there were native eyes who looked upon it first. And they saw no passage there but simply a place beyond home. The striving in this gallery exhausts him, and he is so preoccupied with it he does not see Francis approach from across the hall.

“Are we prepared for this, do you think?”

James spins to face him, unable to temper the thrill of laying eyes on him at last. Francis does not appear to be any more well rested than James is. He is bruised beneath the eyes, and James does not think he is imagining a kind of stark frailty to his form. James can see that Francis is observing him in kind; he can feel his gaze running over him. He fiddles with a nonexistent lock of hair as though to put himself to rights. He feels conspicuous before Francis, as though administrative proceedings have already begun.

“I wished to ask you the same thing,” James says. “Only I did not know where to find you.”

“Surely you must have deduced I was with the Rosses.”

“I deduced nothing.”

“That is clear,” says Francis.

He has a faint gleam in his eye, and James feels petulant. He had not realized just how badly he wanted Francis to seek him out. What James hoped to prove that way, he is not certain, but there is a part of him that is angry at Francis for failing to do it.

“Do you truly believe this will be a formality?”

Francis shrugs. “I suppose one cannot be sure. But I have been assured of it by a man who ought to.”

James disrupts the pile of the carpet with his boot. “Of course it has been easy for you, returning. You have been in the company of friends.”

“You ought to have called on me,” Francis says. “I assumed you back in Hertfordshire or Brighton or someplace, larking about.” He flaps his fingers.

Francis seems to be at far greater ease with the whole operation than James. There was a time not so very long ago when James thought himself the more competent by far of the two of them, and of course he was proven wrong, soundly and a hundred times over. But it is nonetheless stunning to be reminded how green he is compared to Francis, who has taken arms against higher seas than this all his life, while James has spent his cloaked comfortably in his own mythology.

They stand together murmuring, heads angled close. To an onlooker they would appear to be deep in council on some matter or another, and they ought to be, ought to be making the most of the time allowed to straighten their story, not talking in circles to assuage James’s restless envy. Of whom is he envious? James Ross? Or is it merely that Francis, strained as he appears, seems to have found a place to fit back into?

Francis claps a hand on James’s epauletted shoulder. “Peace, James. All will be well. You’ll see, we will walk out of this hall with you staring down the nose of a command.”

“And you?”

“And myself scuttled in the shallows, God willing.” 

James allows Francis to shake him about by the shoulder the way he used to do at times on the ice, as though he could cast off James’s myriad worries as one might stamp out a frozen foot. At least he can rest assured that Francis believes the court martial to be the sum cause of his disquiet, and he can take the fading warmth of Francis’s hand into the council chamber with him when the doors open and they are called inside.

In the end, Francis is right. The court martial is a legal proceeding in name only. The Admiralty has written the story of the expedition without them, had done so before they had even been found. They are heroes, and Sir John is the best of them. Their presence is an inconvenience insofar as their ability to disrupt this narrative; indeed, when James asks if they would hear the facts as they happened the men around the table seem to heave a collective sigh of boredom: If we must. James does not need to look at Francis to know this nettles him too, but whatever thoughts the man has on the matter he keeps to himself.

James does leave the room a captain. The news of his promotion evokes a dull, distant pride. You dreamed of this, he tells himself. But did he? He does not entirely believe that version of him still exists. He was nominally a captain when he lay dying on the shale and it did not matter. 

“We will discuss the particulars,” John Ross tells him afterwards. “But a few more weeks, yet. Of course there will be a banquet. I have nearly convinced my nephew to host it, against Captain Crozier’s desperate urgings, no doubt.”

Beside James, Francis allows a thin smile.

When Ross takes his leave, James asks Francis to walk with him. They move in silence as they leave the halls of the Admiralty behind and go out into the brisk morning. The rain of two days previous has cleared, leaving a mackerel sky and chill air.

“You will be knighted,” James says, once they have set an easy pace along the river. James likes the look of Francis with water in the background. On the _Formidable_ they had taken the air on deck together, and James had wondered idly how it would have been to be Francis’s second while they still sailed.

“Good God,” says Francis. “I should hope not.”

“Better to be scuttled with ‘sir’ before your name, surely. Will you truly not return to sea?”

“We shall see what choice presents itself.”

“You’ll be spoilt for it,” James says, which causes Francis to look amused. “What?” James asks him.

“You’re keen to buoy me,” Francis says. “Against what, I wonder?”

“Can I not merely wish for you to have your due?”

“Can you imagine how little I care about my due? I suppose you can. When Ross brought up a posting back there you looked quite ill. Do not worry,” he says to James’s shock. “He was too bloated with altruism to notice. But I have come to know you, haven’t I.”

James stops walking. They stand with their backs to the river, the wind whipping around them. Locks of Francis’s hair play against his forehead beneath his hat like loose straw. The morning’s nerves have ebbed and James feels a bone-deep tiredness coming on in their wake. He wants to be at home, beneath a blanket, but he does not yet wish to be parted from Francis. If they do not continue on then perhaps neither of them will be moved to suggest they turn back. Here with Francis at last, James is torn between the impulse to fall back on jollity and the desire to speak plain, to vent a little of the gloom that has collected inside him like the smog that gathers over the city.

“How do you fare, Francis? How have you filled your time these last weeks? I confess I find it somehow both effortless and impossible.” James has averted his gaze, but he feels the weight of Francis’s hand on his shoulder again, and unaccountably, a heat prickling at the inner corners of his eyes.

“I have resettled my affairs. Collected back-pay, and written to my sisters. Thought on the expedition, at length. I have tried to commit the thing to paper, if you can believe it.”

“Christ,” spits James.

Francis squeezes his shoulder. “At ease. I am not penning my memoirs yet. We learned a great deal there that could yet be valuable, should the Admiralty see fit to acknowledge it. Think on our studies of magnetism, of the Netsilik. We have no surgeons left to speak on the medical perspective but I would try to record my own observations. No doubt I could attest to the course of scurvy as well as any doctor of medicine and better than some.”

James thinks of Harry Goodsir then. On their passage from England James had passed idle hours fishing off the deck, and Goodsir had oft stood near to him catching his specimens, careful to stay far enough that his nets did not interfere with James’s line. He would leave the nets to drag along for hours and then dredge them, hauling them up hand over hand, flooding the deck with great gouts of weed and water. He would go to his knees to sift through them, uncaring for the wet, clutching each new creature in his hands and exclaiming with joy. He would lay them out in rows and take down notes on each, their descriptions and dimensions. Like James, he had some skill at sketching, not uncommon in an anatomist, and when he learned James shared this pursuit he would sometimes show him particularly interesting specimens, or call him over to seek counsel on how to capture this texture, that scale or spine or gill. James wonders what became of these notes when the ships were abandoned, and later when Goodsir was forced to go with Hickey. The man must be dead, along with the mutineers, but James hopes that before he met his end he looked upon one last curious thing. He hopes that, if his fingers twitched to draw it, he knew precisely how its lines should go.

“And you, James? What have you been doing?”

James looks at his hands. “I tried to have a suit made,” he says. “I could not manage it.”

With halting speech he tells Francis how he was overcome at the tailor’s, how he is overcome in the street simply by rubbing shoulders with passersby. The city is too loud, too full of smells. Even the simple plates his landlady leaves for him are too rich with choice and turn his stomach. He eats mechanically, with little pleasure for it. He thought once, on the ice, how badly he should like to hear music again, but the thought of sitting cheek to jowl in a box at the opera makes him tremulous.

“It is difficult,” Francis says. “I feel it too. Felt it, after my other polar journeys, though this time is worse. It is more than just the habitual yearning for the sea. It is—knowledge, I think. You understand too well what other worlds there are.” 

James presses his lips together, for this is it exactly. “You think, how can they walk about so blithely? Fret over the weather or a Victoria sponge. I heard a young lady exclaiming over exactly that—the disagreeable thickness of its jam. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders.”

“It will lessen. Else you will go to sea again and forget it until the next time.”

“They have never been cold. Nor hungry. Nor—” 

“Would you wish it for them? We have borne it, James, and come through the other side. It may help to look upon friends. I see James Ross and think I would gladly have borne it that he did not have to.”

James Ross, at least, has some hope of imagining. James thinks of George Barrow and feels his stomach turn. He thinks of Will, of Elizabeth, but he cannot see how to look at them with such thoughts behind his eyes. Le Vesconte is gone from London. He has spoken to no one else and cannot fathom seeking them out after so much time. James wants to tell Francis that, in this, he is the only friend he has, but he fears if he speaks the words all the rest of what he feels will spill out too, and he could not bear to see Francis turn from him.

How unfortunate, thinks James, that after so long living carelessly in matters of love he should be brought low by them now, and for the one man who might be said to truly understand him. He recalls their easy intimacy on the passage home, before he had quite realized what he felt. He mourns that closeness, with its lack of complication. There will be no returning to it, nor anywhere near, should he confess.

“I would see you with a lighter look,” says Francis, clearly troubled by James’s demeanor. “The elder Ross spoke true. There is to be a banquet in our honor, and James will host it, and it is very expressly contrary to my wishes, which alas mean nothing against the whims of those who insist we be adequately feted.”

“If you mean this news to soothe me, you may be disappointed,” says James. But the words do elicit a smile. Francis always could charm him with his grousing once James was no longer so often included in it.

“Can this be the same James Fitzjames I know? Turning up his nose at a party? I am duly shocked. But no, James, I do not mean this banquet to alleviate your particular tension. I am merely suggesting that misery loves company, and I would very much appreciate yours on the occasion.”

“I don’t suppose I have a choice.”

“You do not. Damn a balanced table, I have said to Lady Ross. We two must be seated adjacently.”

“Then you have saved my life twice over, Francis,” James says. And does feel a little soothed, and laughs in earnest.

* * *

The banquet is held a week hence. James spends the interim in his rooms, brooding. That Francis shares in James’s malaise has not cured it, but has somehow given James leave to indulge it totally. He has had his trunks delivered from storage and he sorts through them with care, pleased to find old books and drawing materials in one, a scant wardrobe in the other. He takes a cue from Francis and writes, though he cannot bear to revisit the details of their time in the Arctic and is unsure he will ever be able to do so. He writes letters, to the Coninghams and to Le Vesconte. He writes a letter to Francis too, and burns it. He draws: the view from his window, across the rooftops. A still life he arranges. A self portrait in his looking glass, which he also destroys, for he has drawn it with hair too long, with a bare neck that descends not into his customary linens but into velvet.

He still has the dress, of course. He has not taken it out of his pack, but has folded the whole thing into one of the trunks. He imagines he can feel it there, hear it like the beating of a heart, a living thing with queer energies all its own. He is afraid to consider these at length. He fears somehow that to think on them too much would be to give them form, to take them into himself, where they would tangle with his very fibres until they were inextricable, if they are not already so.

He feels as though he has eroded like a dune, but he has yet to name what remains in his place. When he lies down to sleep at night his thoughts are crowded with Francis and with Kitty at Barrow’s floating tavern. In the dark he grows bolder and allows himself to think of both of them, to picture himself before Francis dressed as the whore had been, his barest self somehow, barer even than standing naked before him as a man. His cock fills to think of it but he does not pursue this reaction to its natural end. He cannot properly dream up Francis’s response, and when he attempts to do so he begins to dwell too long, so long his body gives up on him and retires.

The evening of the banquet he dawdles, and is one of the last to arrive. He seeks out Francis immediately and finds him standing to one side in the drawing room, talking quietly to Ross. Francis looks very fine in his dress uniform, and he meets James’s eyes with a curious look that James cannot interpret beyond the fact that it reminds him of the look Barrow gave him when James put on his new suit. Only James knows Barrow, and he knows Francis, and surely there can be no similarity between the two of them. He grins at Francis, who smiles back, and the look is gone as quickly as it came.

“Thank heaven you’ve come at last, Fitzjames,” Ross says. “I’ve had the unenviable task of keeping Francis from disappearing upstairs on the premise of fetching some relic or other. I fear if he does so he shall never return.”

“I meant only to collect my monograph. I thought to show it to your uncle,” says Francis.

“You know as well as I they will have no ear for business tonight. I shall leave you in Fitzjames’s capable hands. I will be fairly strung up by my lady wife if I do not circulate to her liking.” Ross spreads his arms to pat James and Francis on the shoulders simultaneously, and then he disappears into the crowd.

“That man ought to know there is no containing you,” says James. “If you wish to go, you will certainly go.”

“I would not hide in my room, James, however much I might like to.”

“I should hope not. I am here at your behest, after all.” This is not entirely true, but James will pretend it anyway.

Left alone together there is a flustered feeling, which Francis resolves by finding James refreshment. “Will you have a drink? Thompson, bring Captain Fitzjames a glass, good lad.” He nods at a footman, who returns a moment later with a glass of brandy.

“Do you continue to abstain?”

Francis nods. “I think it best,” he says. “That, and parting myself from it again would likely kill me. It was a truly gruesome experience, James. You cannot imagine it.” He pauses at that, as though reconsidering. For James can well imagine being near to dying. Being gruesome. Francis opens his mouth slightly as if to refute himself, but James shushes him, reaching for him and clasping his arm above the elbow.

“We both bear our scars,” James says. And because the moment feels grave, he adds, “some more dashingly than others.” He draws himself up with a flourish, sweeps his hair demonstratively from his forehead. He is playacting tonight. 

Francis laughs. He seems to understand. “You must tell them about the Chinese sniper who twice failed to kill you,” he says. “That would be well worth the price of admission.” 

There is, after all, a price of admission. Lady Jane Franklin is present at the party, as is her niece Miss Cracroft, and while there were no tickets sold to this affair it has been communicated to those civilians in attendance that they ought to strongly consider a generous donation to the Sir John Franklin Memorial Fund, which will create not only several monuments to the man but, if all goes to plan, a boarding school for orphans.

“Orphans are always a worthy cause,” says James to Lady Jane, when pressed for an opinion.

“Oh, Captain Fitzjames. I thought so too. And may I say, I am so cheered to hear your approval of the concept.” She fixes him with a pleased squint, and turns her head to dab at her watery eyes.

He recalls a moment before the launch at Greenhithe: he had happened upon her on _Erebus_ in council with Sir John, engaged in listing off James’s various deficiencies. He had stood frozen for a moment behind the unlatched door, but forced himself to leave before she might touch upon his uncertain parentage. James had not wished to hear of their speculations, wary of giving himself any more cause to be unsteady before Franklin. At the time he had forgiven her, as he forgives her now. For what are these Navy wives but their own kinds of conquerers? They crave the portraits, the memoirs as much as any admiral. What might they strive for, if not their own scrap of territory, staked as it is within four walls, a land named not for themselves but for some virtue, some serene attribute that must nonetheless represent them? He does not think he could bear it.

Across the room Francis is speaking with Sophia Cracroft. Left alone by Lady Jane, James endeavors to avoid staring at them. He considers that there is nothing to stop him from simply going to them and joining their conversation, but he wonders if, having also been closely acquainted with Francis, Miss Cracroft might glean the secrets of James’s heart. She looks at Francis with an open, gentle frankness, and James can see this look twinned on Francis’s face. He feels a stab of pain, and is tempted to court it. Instead he straightens. He will not allow envy to sully what he feels for Francis. He will transmute it however he must, but only into goodness, into friendship. He wishes Francis every happiness. If he should seek to renew his suit, to attempt a third proposal, James will offer his unwavering support. Dressed as he is, in the trappings of the man he once was, James can almost believe he is in earnest.

A hand about his arm rouses him from these thoughts. “James Fitzjames,” crows Barrow, as though James needs assistance recalling his own name. “The other night you slunk away from me like a cur.”

“I am sorry,” says James. “I took ill.”

As Barrow crowds him James looks over his shoulder; Francis has parted from Miss Cracroft, and to James’s dismay is presently cutting a path towards them. _Oh, please leave me,_ James thinks at Barrow, trying to think of some excuse other than the one he has just offered. It would not be so outrageous; simply standing in George Barrow’s presence is quite sickening indeed.

Barrow snorts. “That old ailment,” he says, just as Francis arrives. He looks from James to Barrow and back again, and James can see the moment at which the confession on King William Island unspools in Francis’s memory. Knowing what Francis does, it would require only a modicum of imagination to arrive at the precise manner of scandal from which James had helped Barrow escape.

Francis addresses Barrow directly, with one eyebrow aloft. “What ailment is that?”

“Captain Francis Crozier,” James says belatedly. “My—friend, George Barrow.”

Barrow carries on as though James has not spoken. “One could call it lovesickness,” he says, teeth gleaming. “Our Fitzjames has lately been mightily afflicted. I regret to tell you, sir, but I called on the young _lady_ in question just the other night and she had made a miraculous recovery. I fear you did not impress yourself upon her quite thoroughly enough.”

James thinks numbly what a miracle it would be to expire posthaste, though even this would not be soon enough to miss the strangled look on Francis’s face. No doubt he is horrified at Barrow’s impropriety, or James’s, or more likely both, and with Barrow standing here James cannot explain himself. What would he say to do so, if he could? _Francis, do not judge me for passing my most sociable evening since our return in the presence of whores and opium eaters, and failing to do even that correctly_?

James is saved by the dinner bell, at which Barrow excuses himself and disappears, having deployed his mischief as desired. Again James is left opposite Francis, and though James thinks it unlikely that any libation will improve things he finds and downs a drink and chases it with another.

“If I may be so bold,” says Francis, “to whom was Barrow referring?” 

“Pay him no mind. He is always quite enamored of his own version of events.” James licks his lips. His throat smarts with liquor. “Well,” he says to Francis, who appears unconvinced. “Shall we?” 

Francis watches him as they move to take their seats, which are indeed adjacent, but James decides this is an improvement so long as he has managed to introduce some sliver of doubt regarding Barrow. Though why does it matter? Francis gave his word he would keep James’s secret. What James does behind closed doors is his own business. 

They are placed at the center of the table, before them an elaborate candelabra. Two women flank them, giggling at the sight of the two men seated together. James notes that George Barrow is seated very far away, as are Miss Cracroft and Lady Franklin, and most of the other naval officers. One might think Francis had had some hand in this too, for here James is insulated from any serious conversation about the expedition. The lady opposite peeks at James coquettishly around the candelabra. He studies her: there is a dab of some balm on either eyelid. He pictures her before the mirror, pinching her cheeks to a bloom, worrying her lips between her teeth. How strange, he thinks, how monstrous, the exchange of pain for beauty. From the corner of his eye he sees Francis watching him as he looks at her. This regard irritates him; he has already assumed Francis’s judgement with Barrow earlier and he sums the two together.

He drinks steadily throughout the meal, which is endless and elaborate, course after course brought out by white gloved waiters. The food is what undoes him, in the end. It had been amusing, on ships, to discuss favorite dishes from home. Over the hundredth meal of salt pork one might make a game of going around the table: this is the morsel, the sweetmeat I might kill a man for a taste of. When the salt pork was gone, when the tins were found to be pitted with lead, this game ceased to be amusing, and James had started carrying on as though no food existed in the world, for there was no other way to avoid going mad. But such resistance required concentration, which James lacked as he grew sicker, and before his collapse he would often find himself marching towards long laden tables, a cornucopia set up beside the Pavilion on the horizon.

Tonight he finds himself in the middle of his most dizzying fantasy. If he found the landlady’s cottage pie decadent he finds the banquet unfathomably so: there are two soups, a clear consommé and a cream. _Haricots verts_ and stewed mushrooms, glazed with a sheen of butter. There are angels-and-devils brought out on little trays, mince pies the size of James’s hand. Baskets of dense rolls that steam when broken open. Little balls of sweet butter in an iced bowl. Woodcock and roast hare and a leg of lamb that flops off the bone and nearly causes James to duck beneath the table and retch.

The assembly tucks in with distressing nonchalance. James feels as though he is hovering just outside of himself watching the proceedings. Vaguely, he hears people speaking to him. The woman beside him murmurs something, touches his arm. Francis asks him a question, face a moue of concern, and James may say something back or he may not. He notes that Francis’s plate is just as bare as his: a small tinderpile of long beans, a piece of bread. Francis, like James, has hazarded one of the little woodcocks, and a piece of flaky fish. Neither of them has managed the lamb.

The conversation rises and falls around them. The waiters refill James’s glass over and over. The woman beside him begins to talk about the Esqimeaux with authority derived from a penny dreadful.

“And I have begun to teach myself a few phrases in their language,” she adds, _sotto voce._

Her brother is apparently a polar veteran, though there are a very many snowy places in the world, and James fears she—or perhaps her brother—may be mixing them up. She stammers out something that sounds like no Inuktitut James has ever heard. In fact, more than anything it resembles the hooting of a deranged owl, but James merely nods politely and thinks of life-restoring warmth, remedies pressed to his stinging wounds, the fathomless red of seal’s liver. Beside him Francis shifts upon his chair. He clutches a glass of tonic water. James can see him working his jaw as if chewing a tough bit of meat.

The tinkle of a fork on crystal interrupts the woman’s linguistic manglings. A toast, first to Franklin, and then to the others lost. Over a hundred gone unnamed. James, blurred by drink, cannot even number them correctly. To Franklin, says the table. Lady Jane is all tears. Sophia Cracroft is looking at Francis. Beneath the tablecloth James digs his nails into his thigh. He knew this moment would come; it is the point of the thing, after all. The table turns as one to look on James and Francis.The glasses are raised and raised again.

“Speech,” someone calls out. “Speech!” 

The clamor runs the length of the table, everyone looking, everyone hammering on their glasses. Francis will give no speech. They are all looking at James, who five years ago would have bounded up onto his chair to oblige them. Tonight he feels as though something has hold of his throat. Perhaps he has swallowed the slender bone of a woodcock. He shuffles and coughs. At last he rises, and the room quiets for him.

James might be back in the wardroom on _Erebus_. He can feel a touch of that same swagger, though now as then he is harried by Francis, who calls his name and reaches for him. Francis, always intent on thwarting him. But it is too late. James is already standing. Once on his feet he has to grip the table to keep from stumbling.

“Ladies,” James begins. “Gentlemen.”

They murmur their replies. He looks out over the table and feels as though his eyes have been smeared with some unguent, for their faces seem to blur and change in the candlelight. This is disorienting, but he continues. “I thank you for coming here tonight, and for the immense honor—the immense honor—”

He trails off, losing himself in the candelabra. The flames lick and leap. The dinner guests have donned masques they are only just removing, and as they bare their faces James can see the faces of his men as they were in the tent at first, not yet afraid. He staggers backwards, blinks. Francis’s hand flies to the small of his back but he barely feels it. He reels from side to side, but he has a drunk’s confidence in his movements and forges on regardless. If he is in the tent again, can he not draw upon that James Fitzjames? He was thuggish then, and radiant. He takes a ragged breath and attempts to recover himself.

“I know you all,” he says. “You have come here for stories. Tell me then—what would you hear from me?”

_“James.”_

Francis plucks at his sleeve. James will not hazard a look at him. To look at Francis would be the gravest error. No, if he is to come through this intact he must go on, and he must not look at Francis. Luckily the room obliges him. A forest of talk springs up, James lurching from tree to tree.

_Hear, hear,_ the guests call. _We would hear of the bear. I heard it was as big as the Brighton Pavilion. Sir John, Captain. Won’t you tell us how he died? Tell us of the Eskie girls, Fitzjames. Do they wear bloomers under all those furs? Is it true a Chinese bullet rotted clean out of your arm? Is it true men thought of eating horrible things, fresh and bloody things, when the tins spoiled and the slop inside was choked with pellets?_

The women titter collectively. Perhaps the evening will turn bawdy without their being noticed. The whole room is getting away with something. James is the gaoler who has fallen asleep, the shopkeeper who has turned his back. They are robbing him blind and he is looking over his shoulder and catching glimpses of it. He has told them nothing yet but it feels good to allow them to demand things. He imagines they have had so many questions. He wants to tell them he has, too.

Across from him the woman’s painted face grows harder angles. Her bosom in its silks and satins flattens, and at once Kitty peers around the brass candelabra. James leans down and leers at him. He wonders if perhaps he should have tried to have him that night with Barrow after all. Lovesick. James is sick indeed, but not for Kitty. But Kitty smiles on regardless, lips a slash. James leans for them. Too far, too far—his breast abuts the candelabra, and at once there is a flagrant rush, the animal sizzle of burning wool. Someone is shouting, someone jerks him back. Hands slap at the front of his waistcoat. James expects the lick of pain, but there is none.

Kitty’s mouth is open. James waits and waits for him to laugh, but he does not. “He’s drunk,” he says instead. A murmur all around, like the rushing of the sea. And here is the laughter, thin and mean, seeping from the periphery. Firm hands take him by the shoulders, force him back into his chair, for he has not offered them anything, not really. He is drunk and talking out of turn.

“God damn it all,” growls Francis. 

James tries to wrest himself free. “Leave off,” he groans, but Francis is all thunder. He towers over James. He braces one hand on James’s shoulder to keep him still, and as James watches in numb astonishment, he brings the other down hard upon the table. The noise of it is terrific, the whole long length of wood seeming to shudder and shrink from Francis at once. Glasses upend themselves. The candelabra has gone out, but James can still smell something burning.

Then quiet, the room becalmed. James’s wineglass has succumbed to Francis; it pitches back and forth on its side across the bowl of his dessert plate. Its contents sheet down the tablecloth onto James’s shins, soaking into his stockings. Beneath Francis’s hand James fears to move, and doubly so when he begins to speak. James can hear the fire in him before he even starts, can feel Francis hauling it up from deep within himself, for Francis Crozier has always had such fire to harness.

“The only story here is this one,” says Francis. “So you had better listen well.”

“I said a service for this man in a putrid tent. I believed him to be dead, but he lived. His life was spared by the grace of God and by the Esqimeaux. By some compact worked out between their gods and ours.” This is a kind of blasphemy, but Francis does not falter. He grasps James, so there will be no mistaking who he means. A strange thing happens to Francis’s voice when he speaks of James: it warps and warbles, like something set upon water. He and James have got the same bone in their throat. 

Francis is looking down the table at Lady Jane, at Sophia, who cries openly.

“I do not know why James lived,” he says, voice bowed in apology. “I do not know why I lived. It may trouble you to hear we were beyond heroism there, but we were. There was God, perhaps. There was the ice. That was all. And there are no other stories.”


	5. Chapter 5

James is uncertain what excuses Francis makes to bundle him out of the party and onto the street, only that he does it, and far too shortly they are alone together before the Rosses’ town house.

“Please say your lodgings are close by,” says Francis. “I do not trust you in a hansom. You might leap out of the cab and take the reins.”

“I’d be sick in a hansom,” James says matter-of-factly. “I may be sick now.”

Francis takes him by the elbow and steers them away from the doorstep. They do not speak on the walk. James is grateful for the silence. The night air and the grim understanding of what has just transpired are beginning to sober him, but as he staggers home, Francis walking close enough that their arms brush together, James finds he cannot yet stand to look upon the night with his wits fully about him.

James’s lodgings are not far; on half pay he adheres to a time-honored tradition of taking derelict rooms in a fashionable part of the city, which had been tolerable in theory because he would be out all of the time, and then he would return to sea. And if he were to bring a particular friend home for some reason, they would both of them be so drunk that the state of James’s flat would not matter. Unfortunately, tonight only one of them is drunk, and it is not James’s houseguest.

“Christ, James. Do you mean to say you live here?”

James cannot make an appropriate rejoinder, for he trips just as he gets over the threshold, the toe of his boot catching on the raised corner of a floorboard. He is unaccustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the place, he thinks from the comfortable plain of the floor. He is sprawled in his erstwhile parlor, as much as one can claim individual rooms in what is essentially one middling one, with a bed and washbasin tucked in its corners. The landlady suggested to him, when he came to make inquiries, that he might partition it with lacquered screens.

Francis curses. “Get up,” he says. “I do not believe I can haul you bodily from the floor.”

“I shall sleep here. Be a dear, Francis, and toss me down a pillow.”

“I will not,” says Francis. “Up with you.” And he begins to kick at James most intolerably until James rises. Above him looms a trio of Francis Croziers, their heads spinning a lazy circle in the lamplight.

“You look like a sun dog,” says James. He clambers to his feet with some difficulty. There is wetness on his face and an indistinct pain.

Francis frowns deeply at him. “You’ve split your lip,” he says. “Where’s a towel?” He pats his chest for a handkerchief, and finding none throws his hands up. “Have you no linens?”

“We are not all houseguests of Sir James Clark Ross,” James says.

“The lowest charwoman has a clean set of tea towels, James Fitzjames.”

James tilts his chin towards the ceiling. Even in his diminished state he is aware he ought to try and spare his uniform. He trips over to one of his chests and rummages through it, thinking he must have a rag somewhere. The first item he produces is the velvet dress, which Francis stares at balefully.

“There’s nothing for it,” Francis says. “You’re bleeding everywhere.” He shrugs out of his jacket.

As James sways on his feet, Francis discards jacket and waistcoat, cuffs and cravat. He tugs his undershirt free of his trousers and, stretching the hem taut between his hands, yanks a strip of linen free. He looks quite serious about it, which is nearly enough to make James laugh, though his lip has begun to throb and sting. “Come here,” says Francis, but instead he is the one who comes to stand in front of James, linen wadded in one hand, the other hanging in the air for an uncertain moment before coming to rest on James’s cheek as a bee alights upon a flower.

“You have ruined your shirt,” James says. “You ought to have torn the velvet. It is tattered anyway.”

“Hush,” says Francis. The admonition is delivered softly, so softly that it ushers a tortuous warmth from the base of James’s skull. James hushes.

Francis dabs at his lip. As he does, his eyes remain on James’s face. He does not look James in the eye directly, but neither is he evasive. His eyes roam and catalogue, and the look in them is one of such care that James could shut his own eyes and fall asleep beneath its weight. The last time Francis watched him thus, touched him thus, James was dying.

They stand together for what feels like a very long time. Francis’s hand is warm against James’s cheek. James can feel his fingertips through the linen. He could touch them with his tongue, if he had a mind to do it.

Francis moves his hands away. “Has it stopped?”

James’s lip is no longer bleeding, but it has left the pale cloth blotched with red. James balks to see it, that tubercular image, and Francis must see the look on his face, because he crumples the linen and shoves it into his pocket. There is a burdened look about Francis, as though he has extracted something from James he wears draped over his own shoulders. Removed from Francis’s insulating gaze James can recall the banquet, the terrible sight of Francis standing with a hundred eyes roving and scraping over him, the complete inverse of the way he has just considered James. And why had Francis allowed it? Only so those eyes would not crawl over James, prise out secrets Francis knew he would have given up only because he was not in his right mind.

James ducks his head. “I have been a perfect fool,” he says.

“You have been through the wars, James. You have earned the right to be a little foolish.”

“You should not have spoken to them that way.”

“I shouldn’t have thrown myself on the pyre for you, you mean? I thought we had established I was on my way out to pasture. Perhaps I only meant to make quicker work of it. Perhaps I was not thinking of you at all.”

James steps closer, takes hold of Francis’s forearm. He feels if he does not stop him Francis is liable to retreat into the night, to go off to his far pasture directly, and never be seen again.

“Francis,” James begins. But Francis does not let him continue, simply removes James’s hand from his shirtsleeve and returns it to him as though he has borrowed it.

“Let’s get you to bed,” he says. 

What follows is reminiscent of the worst nights in the tent. James is suffused with guilt for the manner in which he allows himself to be handled by Francis, marched over to the bed and sat down, Francis kneeling and huffing to tug off his boots. James manages his own jacket; Francis helps him with his waistcoat. His gloves have been lost, and he badly hopes his hat remains in James Ross’s cloakroom. Francis moves to unfasten James’s flies, but James shrugs away.

“Enough,” he says. He ought not take advantage of Francis’s generosity of spirit, no more so than he already has.

Francis complies, but continues to fuss. “I should have nicked you some savories. You’ll be wanting something to fill your stomach.”

“I could not eat,” James says. In bed, sleep encroaches rapidly. Already he is yawning, stretched out on his side, feet sweeping the cool corners of the mattress. Francis retreats to the armchair and begins to work his own boots off. Something in James loosens to see him settling. “Take the blanket,” James says, kicking at the spare folded at the foot of the bed. “Francis, please.”

“They served floating islands for pudding. You didn’t even notice.”

“I was--”

James means to say he was indisposed, or, more plainly, that he was quite spectacularly drunk, but he finds he cannot finish. He remembers the night on _Formidable,_ his frivolous question, Francis’s grudging attempt to play along. And later, when he had been afraid for Francis, for the ill luck he might court knowing James’s nature. James cannot help but think of how burdened he looks tonight. Ship-broke, Francis said of him. Perhaps they are both of them this way. Perhaps they have been for a long time.

As James lies still, eyes imperceptibly open, Francis rises from the armchair again and crosses to stand beside the bed. James has been quiet so long that Francis must think him asleep. He does not take the blanket as James directed. Instead—contrary man!—he unfolds it and smooths it over James, tucks it below his chin. His eyes closed in earnest, James feels him move off, but there is a pressure in the air before the bed that tells him Francis hovers still. For a moment, all is quietude. And then a touch comes, like the vane of a feather, to trace the swell of James’s wounded lip.

* * *

He wakes in the morning feeling better than he has a right to, though his mouth is dry and a faint headache beats behind his temples. He rolls onto his back and sits up slowly, and it is only when he sees Francis that he recalls the end of the night before. Francis remains upright in the armchair. He looks as though he is sleeping on a train, both stockinged feet on the floor, head propped on his hand. His cheek creases against his palm, and he has draped his jacket over his shoulders. The morning air is chilled, and Francis breathes out little clouds that limn his profile in the slice of light allowed in by the parted winter curtains.

James clambers from the bed and goes to stoke the fire in the fireplace, which Francis must have fed some time in the night. Then he retrieves the spare blanket from his mattress. He approaches Francis carefully, and is considering whether to remove the jacket or simply arrange the blanket atop it when Francis starts and lifts his head.

“I was trying not to wake you,” James says.

“Then you ought not to stamp about so heavily,” grumbles Francis, blinking. “How do you fare this morning?”

“I shall improve with breakfast.” James perches on the arm of the chair, setting the blanket on Francis’s lap. “You may use my bed if you wish,” he says. “I truly did not mean to wake you, and you can’t have passed a restful night in this.” He thumps the back of the chair.

“You would be surprised,” says Francis dryly. “I have a featherbed at the Rosses’, and a maid who stokes my fire all night long. Yet I’ve had to send her out and stoke it myself, because I am perpetually awake. I have passed my best night in weeks here, curled in your armchair.”

James smiles, which makes his lip twinge. “You’ll have me gloating. Is it odd that I should be so satisfied for my little armchair to beat out James Ross’s featherbed?”

Francis gives him a long look. “It has not exactly surprised me,” he says. “In fact, I believe it has proven a point.”

“Oh?” James prods at his lip. He has begun to feel a frisson of concern, for Francis looks quite serious.

“When we returned, I thought we would go back to our lives as they were before. That we would go forward as old friends, see each other here and there. I thought you must be tired of me, to have lived as we did for so long.”

“On the contrary--” 

“I was wrong not to seek you out sooner. You said I was in the company of friends, and you were right. But I have been miserable company to them. Obstreperous and solitary. Like our creature, made meaner for its injuries. I realize now it was all for want of you. I would not presume to say you are better off with me around, but I find myself quite unbearable without you.”

James cannot stop the laugh that bursts forth. “Oh, my dear Francis,” he says. “Is it not abundantly clear how much worse I am without _you?_ ”

Unthinking, he snatches up Francis’s hand, and holds it on his knee between his palms. Francis has gone still, but as in the tent all those months ago, he has not moved his hand away. He is looking up at James, and that careful, considering weight has come into his eyes again. He is looking at James as though he would rather look at nothing else, as though it would pain him to tear his eyes away.

James cannot be certain, for one cannot be certain of anything. He might be fathoms off his mark, or it might be right in front of him, near enough to touch. He must step right off the brink.

“Francis,” James says softly. “Can you possibly feel as I do?”

“I do not know what I feel,” Francis says.

James can scarcely hear for the rushing in his ears. “I wonder, then, if you would allow a small experiment.” 

Francis’s face is perfectly expressionless. His lips are slightly parted. His cheeks are pink. But his eyes—

Courage, James. Already joy threatens to carry him off, but he is wary to the last. Close means nothing to voyagers like them. James will set his foot upon this shore, and then he will believe. He swallows. “What do you feel,” he asks, “when I do this?” James lifts Francis’s hand and brushes his lips against his knuckles.

A harshly drawn breath. Still Francis does not pull away. “Or this?” James murmurs, and turns Francis’s hand to press a kiss to the center of his palm, to the open fingers that fed his life back to him in Nunavut. To the flesh that rises before Francis’s thumb and the pulse point at his wrist. Only then does his hand move, falling away from beneath James’s lips to reappear a heartbeat later at his cheek, urging his head up.

When James meets them, Francis’s eyes are shining. “Dearest James,” he says.

James has his answer. But he has heard that to be assured of validity, one’s results must be replicated in a variety of conditions. So he feels it is imperative that he lean in and kiss Francis on the mouth.

He is hampered by last night’s injury, and cannot kiss Francis with maximum abandon. He compensates with the number and the frequency of his kisses. Over and over he presses his lips to Francis’s, quite chastely by James’s standards, but no less ardent for being so. Francis does not find them lacking, to judge from the noises he makes: small sighs of pleasure James has never heard before and feels honored to hear now. He slides from the arm of the chair into its seat, half on Francis’s lap, and here he moves beyond Francis’s mouth to kiss his cheeks, his forehead, the length of his neck. He touches Francis, and he feels Francis’s hands too—on his neck and tangled in his hair, as though they have each been tasked with mapping the other this way.

The heat that builds between them grows gradually, so that James moves from pleasantly warm to uncomfortable all at once. Such a surplus of heat; once not so long ago he could not have imagined mustering the audacity required to strip out of his clothes without thought. He has jerked his linens free of his trousers and his fingers are on his shirt buttons when he sees Francis’s face, which is awestruck, and which arrests James’s haste to undress. He is suddenly all too aware that he is not new to these base matters, for all that he may be out of practice.

“Am I ahead of myself?” James asks. “Do you desire this?”

Admittedly the questions are belated, and he supposes he deserves it when Francis laughs at him, a shocked bark as he discards the blanket, takes hold of James’s hand and sets it in his lap. He looks pointedly at James and rolls his lip between his teeth. Francis is quite stiff beneath his trousers. Though the feel of him under James’s hand makes James hotter still, causes sweat to prickle all over him, he cannot abide any pause to remove his clothing. He must resume kissing Francis immediately, must grind his palm against Francis as he does so, must capture all of Francis’s sweet sounds in his mouth and swallow them down like nectar.

They move together in a disorganized ecstasy of fits and starts. There is a perfectly serviceable bed across the room, but it may as well be an ocean away, just as the time required to undress may as well be an eternity. Here at last, James thinks again of that word, _close_ , and how, in retrospect, they have been so very close for such a long time. James aching with a nameless lack. Francis’s fist against his jaw. Francis palms that same place and drives against James’s thigh. All is pressure and strain and James thinks of the ships as they still must lie in the ice, timbers groaning under and against it, slick bergs whispering at them to bend, to bend, and at last to give way.

Francis is muttering indistinctly. James can discern platitudes, encouragements. Francis bids him not to stop but there is no danger of that, for James will not stop as long as he is alive. He believes he stutters some version of this in Francis’s ear, because Francis cries out and clutches at James’s hips, and shortly after they are both lost to their pleasure.

There is a moment in the immediate aftermath when the sharpness of James’s climax has receded and he is left chilled, wet about the crotch of his trousers, and a little afraid. He has come through this reverie with his lips on Francis’s neck and much as he might wish to remain here indefinitely, he cannot. His left foot has gone numb, and he is hungry. At this rate, Francis must have fairly merged with the cushions. James sits up slowly, disentangling himself from Francis, reversing course to sit upon the arm of the chair again.

“Well,” James says. “I suppose you are quite awake.”

Francis looks up at him, quite disheveled. His face is a field of rosy skin that persists down his neck and beneath his shirt. Less pressed for time, James wants so badly see Francis as naked as is possible to be, and have Francis look upon him thus in turn. 

“Am I? I thought perhaps I was still asleep, and dreaming.”

As he speaks Francis’s demeanor grows brisk, as though any moment he will get up from the chair and set about leaving the flat. He moves aimless hands about, trying to put himself to rights, but what is undone in them cannot be simply buttoned up or combed back into place. Nor does James wish it to be.

“I think not, unless I have dreamed an identical dream. And if I have, Francis, I—I should wish to remain in it forever.”

Francis ceases his fretful movements. “Forever,” he echoes. “Truly?”

“Truly.” And James smiles wide at the veracity. His lip hurts, but he does not care.

Truth is a concept with which James Fitzjames has been variously acquainted. Of himself, he can claim precious few truths he holds to be absolute. He is a bastard. He is a sailor. He has appetites and inclinations that have been called unnatural, though James has looked upon the frayed edges of the world, and having done so feels sure that he sits quite naturally within them. He feels at times that he has ceased to be a man, if indeed he was ever one at all. And beside this last certainty, which glows at the heart of him, lies one more: James loves Francis, and as he breathes would never be parted from him.


	6. Chapter 6

By winter James has heard nothing from the Admiralty. “You cannot expect them to turn their minds from Christmas,” Francis says, and James allows himself to be placated until a fortnight into the new year, when he throws a contained fit over tea and biscuits. He suspects the landlady has a soft spot for Francis, who one day helped her catch her cat by virtue of coming in while the cat was going out; since he began taking tea with James the biscuits have rather multiplied. James cannot blame her, for he too allows his soft spot for Francis to grow at every opportunity.

Francis drums his fingers on the table. “You volunteered at what age?”

“Twelve. You know this, Francis, so I do not see—”

“The point, _James_ , is that I fail to see why any quirk of the Royal Navy could yet surprise you.”

“I did not say it surprised me,” James says. “Only that it disappoints me profoundly. And is not a quirk by definition some manner of incongruity, rather than standard practice?” He breaks a piece of shortbread into two and then four pieces and wipes the crumbs off on his trousers. “I simply wish to know my own fate.”

Francis chuckles at James’s disillusion. “You will set about making plans that do not include the Navy, and only when you have made them will the Navy rouse itself to destroy them.” 

The smile he offers James is rueful, for any plans James makes will necessarily include him. If and when James is sent away again it will be Francis in particular he leaves.

“You are ever so wise, Francis.”

“Aye. And generous, that I can still spare a moment for the pups who nip at my ankles.” He sighs. “Ah, James. I can tell you nothing new. I will go where you ask me to. I will even stay with you in this drafty flat, though I will say again that we are two sailors on half pay with no qualms about close quarters, and could thus afford one decent set of rooms between us.”

“I meant to say,” James says. “Will Coningham has come into possession of a country house. It is not large, he says, merely comfortable. I may relocate there at my leisure, as it sits furnished but empty. It was in his wife’s family, apparently, and has recently been inherited.” James has told Will, somewhat obliquely, that he has found himself part of a matched set. What Will thinks of this James cannot say. James had long told him he never planned to marry barring the most dire financial circumstances. But he offered James the house in Sussex shortly afterwards, so even if Will suspects something untoward about James’s assignation with a fellow bachelor-captain, he appears to give his tacit approval.

“You would move to the country?”

“I should like to,” James sputters. “I should like to do a great many things, and I would do them if I knew I had the Navy’s leave.”

“What’s in the country?” asks Francis.

James sighs. Francis can be quite maddeningly obtuse when he wishes to force James to spell something out. “Privacy,” he says.

Francis nods. Slowly he sips his tea, and then he sets the cup down and rises from his chair, comes around the table to loiter beside James. He does not say anything, simply leans against the table until James, fractious, slaps at its surface and makes the teacups jump. 

“What are you doing?” James snaps.

Francis is a kind of irritant to him, but only in the manner of grit to the oyster. Francis lends a strength and shine to James. James craved it in the Arctic before he ever knew Francis capable of giving it, nor he himself capable of accepting. 

Francis sets a hand on James’s shoulder, runs his fingers up to slip beneath his collar and tease at the warm skin of James’s neck.

“Let us move to the country, then,” says Francis. “And enjoy our privacy while we may.”

James leans into Francis’s hand, which moves to palm his cheek, to trace the line that runs from cheekbone to jaw. James closes his eyes. “In that case, I will write Will presently,” he says. He fears his voice is too thick with emotion. He wonders if somehow he has always known that he and Francis together would yield a pearl.

Francis laughs gently. He withdraws his hand. “Get up,” he says. “Do not write to him just yet. I can see you are still in need of distraction.”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” Francis says. “I would have your answer to a question I have been considering at some length.”

“Is this another parlour game? I will preempt you. I am animal, vegetable, and mineral all at once.”

“And an _île flottante_ for good measure. No, no games, nor riddles. I would only ask you if you believe you can dance a waltz without any music.”

James has got to his feet and stands quite close to Francis. They are both in jumpers against the chill in the flat, which truly is quite drafty, though James has his doubts a country house will be so different. There is the prospect of a raging fire, however, and of a man to share his bed. He imagines keeping house themselves, no personals to set to rights to make the place safe for a maid’s eyes. Francis has not stayed the night since the Rosses’ party, and James has grown used to scouring his rooms for any hints of him. He dislikes it already, scrubbing his life clean of Francis in the daylight. The rooming-house has thin walls and the threat of a landlady, but there are doors, and they are behind a closed one. 

“A waltz, you say?”

“On the return voyage we spoke of dancing. You fixed a thought in my mind then, and I am unable to get free of it. My only cure must be to play it out.” He put his arms around James’s waist. “I think you brought your dress along for just this reason.”

James bites his lips to keep from grinning. Why he feels so dogged by caution he cannot say. Perhaps he is approaching the vertiginous edge of a dream. “Speak plainly, Francis.”

“I want you to wear your gown and dance with me.”

James was once ready to give the dress up as a washrag, but he must confess he is glad for the loss of Francis’s shirt. He was not wrong to say the dress was tattered but he would still have no other, for all it has been through, for all the thousands of miles. Sir John would turn in his grave to see him wear it thus, not the fact of James in a dress but the spirit of it, the way he strips down all the way to his smalls for Francis and then removes these too. He has no proper undergarments, so the dress is more close fitting than it ought to be. But it is an old style, and the skirt is not so voluminous as those he sees on the street. He likes the feel of it against his legs. Francis has been instructed to sit on the bed and watch, which he does with bare fascination. James has no dressing room in which to hide himself, so he may as well make a show of it, and Francis is a willing audience.

“I have no face paint,” James says. “If I were truly in costume...”

“How would you apply it?”

“Rouge. Kohl around the eyes. Did James Ross not paint his face?”

Francis swallows. “I do not recall.”

James prefers not to do things in half-measures, but he has no choice. He runs his hands along the lines of his body. The dress clings to his hips, his chest; it was not made for one so tall and the neckline falls short, so that his shoulders are exposed. If James had a bosom the dress would be quite indecent, and by the way Francis stares at him he seems to think the same. He wonders if he could ever be careless with this, and an image comes to his mind: heedlessness like that of his childhood, warm sun and skirts that skim his ankles, bare feet on sweet-smelling grass. If James could be careless, it would be in the country.

James holds out a hand. “I believe your name is next on my dance card, Captain Crozier.”

Dancing a silent waltz is harder than anticipated, though James attempts to conjure triple time, humming a snatch of music of unknown provenance, the same bars over and over. Francis is not a bad dancer, and James was truthful when he said he had no difficulty following. And so they move around the room, quickly enough to warm them though the fire is beginning to burn low as afternoon shades into evening.

If he lets his mind wander James can picture it: the grand tent they made, all their decorations. The occasion better lit and less nightmarish. The band would have played some shaky music and he and Francis would have looked at one another across the floor. They could have danced like this, on the ice. Beneath a carnival tent all things are possible, and for the space of an evening men may set aside all manner of strictures without fear or consequence. If James had felt this way for Francis then he might have told him, might have whispered it to him in some charmed corner, bold with drink.

Francis presses his cheek to James’s, kisses his hair where it curls against his jaw. He has managed to grow it again, which has been a source of unusual relief. He feels more himself than he did shorn. If he were retired and had no grooming standard he might grow his hair long enough to tie back, but at present this will suffice.

The dance devolves. Soon they are swaying together hip to hip, bodies pressed close. Francis holds one of James’s hands and holds him around the waist with the other. If James is not mistaken he can feel the stirrings of Francis’s interest, and his own grows heavy beneath his skirt. 

“Did you dance this way with Miss Cracroft?” James asks.

He finds some contrary satisfaction in thinking of Francis with a woman. He supposes there is a defensive element to it, the desire to pick out what makes James the better prospect after all, to counter the obvious disadvantages of their sort of life. James cannot love Francis openly but he can love him well, and wonderfully besides. 

“Not quite this way.”

“But you might have. Unchaperoned.”

“We were quite frequently unchaperoned,” says Francis. “But I will say no more on the subject.”

Francis is a gentleman. He is also a quick study, for all his practical unfamiliarity with James’s assignation. James must give credit where due; Francis has applied himself with zeal and regularity, and with excellent results. Less than two months they have been together this way and already James finds himself craving Francis’s peculiarities. In idle moments he will catch himself thinking of Francis’s thick fingers, which touch him deftly, of his mouth, which whispers salted epithets. Of his cock, which is stolid and fills James so dependably. Francis had not been with anyone that way before James, but he has been dauntless in his exploration of this undiscovered country.

His hands have moved lower on James’s waist, and the triple time has slowed and stretched. Francis kisses him and they may as well be in an opium drowse for how languid they are. Chaste kisses first as on that initial morning, the mere touch of their lips feeling impossible, thrilling. James is not demure but he will play at it sometimes, making Francis nip and lick at him until he opens and allows deeper kisses in the Florentine manner. And then Francis will hold him still, cup his face and sup from James’s mouth as he used to from a glass of whiskey.

Francis is fully hard against him when James asks if he has had his fill of dancing. “In truth,” says Francis, “I wished mainly to see you wear that dress.

James feels his face grow heated. Can Francis have intuited the significance of the dress? He does not think it likely, but then there is much about Francis that James has been surprised by. Either way he rewards this admission with a hard kiss, and guides Francis off their makeshift dance floor towards the bed. James undresses Francis like a steward, and feels a thrill to think of what Jopson must have enjoyed all those years, for Francis stands at careful, passive attention as James divests him.

“You may remove it,” Francis says, indicating the dress, as though wearing it has been some hardship. The implication lands so far wide of the mark that at first James does not understand what Francis means.

“Oh. No, I—I’ll leave it on.”

“As you wish.”

A curious look. So Francis does not know, then. James is unsure whether or not to feel relief. He ought to, surely, for while James desires to understand himself he cannot require the same of Francis, so far as anyone may require perfect understanding of another. Would it please him for Francis to know? Would it please him more than it would hurt for Francis to decry it?

James bites his lip. Francis looks at him, head tilted. “What is it?”

James shakes his head. “Lie back,” he says. He feels the ghost of Kitty in the bordello, hovering over him, and he thinks again of those most unguarded imaginings, that waking dream he had of standing before Francis. In that dream Francis had known him. He may yet know James, and tonight this is enough.

Francis is flushed from face to chest. His cock is flushed too, that beautiful pink James loves, like the inside of a shell. He bends to taste it and smiles as Francis fairly bucks off the bed altogether, still so highly strung in all these matters despite whatever he and Miss Cracroft might have accomplished unchaperoned. James wants Francis inside of him with minimal delay, so when his breaths begin to come quicker and his fingers play in James’s hair, James pulls away and sits astride him, sweeping his skirts up in his arms and settling them over both their bodies so that they lie together in a pool of velvet. Francis’s hands intrude beneath the skirt but James tuts until they retreat again. Francis is so diligent, and James impatient. 

Once James does surround him, Francis looks tortured. James is gasping too, and for a moment they sit perfectly still, joined together as by some trick hinge in need of oiling. There is no sound but their reedy breathing, and beyond it the diluted noises of the street. James thinks of all the people passing by their window at this very moment, the cabs clacking over the cobblestones. How many of their occupants have never considered this mode of intimacy, never imagined it was possible to be so close to another? James feels sorry for them.

Francis lays spasmodic hands on James’s hips, scratching lightly at the dress’s fabric. “Are you well?” he asks. “Am I hurting you?”

Francis is ever so careful, ever so solicitous. He approaches James’s body each time with an air of reverent confusion, as though he cannot quite understand what is happening to him but desires it anyway. At first James ascribed this to his sex, but as he has grown used to Francis he believes it to be endemic to the man himself. He must have touched women this way, with shaking hands, with nerves. The thought gives James a secret, sparkling pleasure.

“I am very well.” He lifts Francis’s hand to his mouth and kisses it.

They move together slowly. When Francis has him like this James always thinks they will both die of it. He feels more exposed this time, for all he is clothed, feels as though Francis might spear him straight through, puncture James’s heart and send its scarlet vagaries spurting.

“Do you like this, Francis?”

“Of course I do.” He chokes the words out, and James meets each one with a roll of his hips. 

“Tell me.”

“Your heat,” Francis says. “Your—grasp. I could never have dreamed it.”

James leans down carefully and runs a fold of the skirt along Francis’s cheek. “And what of this?” His cock is trapped between Francis’s belly and the skirt’s soft drape, and he hisses at the feel of it. A folly, most likely, to ask these questions, but he cannot help himself. And with a handful of velvet, so Francis knows just what he means.

“James—“

“I once pulled myself off in this dress.” He raises himself up on his knees, sinks down again. Francis curses under his breath and clutches James about the hips as though he fears he will go adrift on the ocean of the bed.

“I did not realize you had ever worn it.”

James rests one hand on Francis’s bare chest. He is delighted by it: these wiry, colourless hairs, the solidity of his flesh, the drum-beat it makes against James’s own when they grow athletic in their lovemaking. He draws his fingers up between Francis’s ribs; like James’s they are mere suggestions. James rises and falls, rises and falls. The expanse and collapse of a breath. Beneath him Francis bares his teeth, transported.

“I was still on _Erebus_ ,” he says. “I stripped in the hold and put it on and touched myself.”

“Christ, James.”

“I thought I might be caught. I did it so quickly, Francis. So urgently. The cold stung me and I thought of someone touching me in all those same places. I thought of being taken. I spent all over the skirt.” 

Francis picks up the skirt, as though he plans to inspect it closely. For a moment James thinks he will lift it to his face and breathe deeply of it, but Francis only worries its softness around and around in his hands, and asks James a question. “What else did you think of?”

“You would hear all my thoughts?”

“Aye,” says Francis.

His hands glide up to James’s waist. Francis stills James and presses into him, splitting him inexorably, on and on until James is full and there is nothing to stop the merging of their souls save the merest skin and the occasional bolt of velvet. James feels a kind of delirium to be here, at the terminus of an arc. The cold stung him on the ship and now his skin is all fire. Everywhere the dress touches him is a thousand mouths, licking, sucking. A thousand teasing fingers, all at the behest of Francis, who looks at him as though he is the sun, come to melt them free of purgatory, melt them down together.

James begins to laugh, the sound to his ear like a flight of birds. He saw green parrots once, a vast flock of them. They dwelt in an ancient temple, and darted between its walls like rockets. His thoughts pelt about like those parrots, a hundredfold, all of the want and hope and fear inside of him. In the tent upon his deathbed he burned away, and formed again of suet and seal meat, a miracle of his own choosing. The hold and the dress were sketches. A presage. 

He bends to meet Francis. His mouth moves over Francis’s mouth. “I thought I was beautiful,” James says.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [Tumblr](https://jouissants.tumblr.com/)!


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